by Rose Tremain
"Indeed! And if you had seen me in the park the other day with my oil paints – "
"You hope to find salvation in art?"
"I'm not speaking necessarily of salvation…"
"But I am, Merivel. For is not death the supreme moment of mortal existence, the hour in which we reap what we have sown?"
"You choose to see it like that, Pearce."
"No. I do not choose. The Lord tells me it is so. And what are you sowing, Merivel, here in your palace?"
"It's merely a manor, Pearce."
"No! It's a palace! And full of iniquity, if these scarlet tassels are anything to go by."
"They're nothing to go by."
"Answer me, Merivel. What are you sowing?"
Again, I looked down. The agricultural metaphors with which the Bible is strewn have always struck me as simplistic and crude, but I particularly did not like Pearce's repeated emphasis on the word "sowing", for it somehow evoked in my mind my letter to the King, which had been intended as a seed in the forgetful Royal brain, but which had indubitably fallen upon stony ground.
I looked up at Pearce, white and gaunt on his white pillow.
"Colour," I said. "Colour and light. I am sowing these."
"What pagan, freakish piffle you do spout, Merivel!"
"No," I said. "Have a little faith, Pearce. Through colour and light, I hope to arrive at art. Through art, I hope to arrive at compassion. And through compassion, though the journey may be a deal more terrible than the one you've just undertaken – your mule is dead by the way – I hope to arrive at enlightenment."
"Enlightenment," said Pearce with a sniff, "is not enough."
"Perhaps. But sufficent to be going on with."
Before Pearce could comment upon this, I plucked his ladle off a walnut escritoire, where a servant had placed it, and handed it to him.
"Here is your ladle," I said. "Play upon it quietly, until you feel restored enough to venture downstairs, where I have something of great beauty to show you."
"What is it?" asked Pearce, suspiciously.
"An Indian Nightingale," I replied. And before Pearce could make some disdainful comment about my bird, I left his room.
I will now tell you that it had become my daily habit to sing a little to my Indian Nightingale. I have no voice at all, and so flat do the notes come out that Minette, in her brief life, used to howl and whimper the moment I opened my mouth, as if I was a desert dog from the Land of Mar. But, my lack of talent notwithstanding, I love singing. I hear the right notes in my head. The fact that I can seldom attain them distresses my listeners, but doesn't seem to upset me in the least. I am, in this respect, like a man trying to fling his body over a five-barred gate and, no matter how spirited his run or ready his heart, finding himself at each attempt still on the wrong side of it and yet nonetheless filled with joy at his efforts. Finn had told me to play the oboe to the bird, and I had sent to London for one of these instruments but, in the meantime, I sang to it, rather quietly so as not to affront it, and it regarded me watchfully, moving its tail up and down and letting fall onto the painted base of the cage tiny filaments of shit.
When at last Pearce rose from his bed and arrived in my Withdrawing Room dressed in his greasy black clothes, he found me singing to my nightingale. Shading his eyes from the brilliance of the furnishings, he approached the cage and stood blinking at it like a lizard. I ceased my singing and the bird at once let out a melodious trill.
"I recognise that," said Pearce.
"What is it?" I asked excitedly. "Something by Purcell?"
"No," said Pearce, and turned upon me a pitying, reptilian look. "That is the warble of a common blackbird."
"Don't be foolish, Pearce," I said at once, meanwhile recognising that my heart, all unfeeling as I know it to be, had started to beat erratically. "The bird was a gift to me. That creature has traveled the oceans."
"When? Who brought it?"
"I have no idea. An ornithologist, no doubt. It has been round Cape Horn. So let us have no more talk of blackbirds!"
Pearce shrugged and turned away from the cage, as if it was of no further interest to him whatsoever. "You've been duped, Merivel," was all he said.
"Very well," I said. "We will go out into the garden and find a blackbird and listen to its feeble song, and you will see that you're wrong."
"As you wish," said Pearce, "but I would remind you that it is winter and birds do not sing a great deal at this time of year."
"Further proof, then, that this is not an English bird. You just heard its lovely trill."
"No doubt it mistook its surroundings for a flower bed."
I smiled at Pearce. The insult he'd intended to my gaudy room in fact pleased me a great deal, and I mention to you, in passing, that Pearce's criticisms of me do not inevitably have the humbling effect upon me that they so strenuously desire.
Pearce and I then put on our cloaks (his so exceedingly threadbare that an irritating shiver of pity ran through me) and went out into the December morning, filigree'd with frost, sparkling and silent in the dry, icy air.
We stood still and listened. Some way off in the park, rooks were circling and cawing above the beech trees, but there was scarcely another sound at all. "Let's walk down the drive a little," I suggested, and we set off at the slow pace always adopted by Pearce, who, if God himself were suddenly to appear before him with open arms, would, I believe, forbear to run, but approach his Maker with his habitual measured and ungainly step.
After we had gone a very little way, a sound I had not expected at all began to clatter and jingle in the frosty quiet. It was the sound of a coach and four. I caught my breath. Without any doubt, it would be Violet Bathurst riding over for a little mulled claret and an hour in my bed, and here was I listening out for blackbirds with the one friend whose mind would be tormented by her arrival. I knew, if I wished to keep Pearce at Bidnold, I would have to send Violet away, however beguiling the thought of her company might be.
We stepped to one side as the coach came on, but as it rounded the curve in the drive, I saw immediately that the beautiful greys which pulled it were not Violet's horses. I was expecting no other guests and couldn't imagine who could be coming to my house at such a gallop.
I put out an arm and the coachman (recognising me by my fine clothes as the master of Bidnold) attempted to slow the horses. But their canter had been so brisk that they and the coach had gone past me before they could be pulled up, and all I had was a fleeting glimpse of a woman's face at the carriage window, shrouded in what appeared to be a black veil.
The coach had now arrived in front of the main doorway. With Pearce trailing me, like the ghost of the exiled John Loseley, I started to run towards the house, unfortunately slipping in my haste on an icy patch of the driveway, falling down in a most humiliating fashion, tearing my peach-coloured stockings and grazing my right hand.
I got up and stumbled on. "Ho there!" I called. "Hello!" But when I arrived, puffing and flushed, at my doorway, I saw that the occupant of the coach had already gone inside the house and that some large boxes and trunks were now being carried in by my footmen.
Noticing with great vexation that my hand was bleeding, I walked into my hallway. After the bright, cold sunlight, it appeared very dark, and indeed I could at first see no one at all. Then I looked up. Standing on the oak stairs was the woman in the black veil. Her stance was strangely familiar to me and, even as she reached up and flung back the veil, I knew whose face I was about to see. It was the face of my wife.
We stood staring at each other. Her stare – notwithstanding my crimson cheeks and my wig fallen over my eyebrows – was far more terrible than mine. She seemed to have aged almost out of time. Her small face, dimpled and pretty in my memory, looked grey and gaunt and her eyes were swollen and red, as if she had been crying day and night since the beginning of winter. I moved forward a pace. I wanted, in my pity for her, to say her name, but realised, even as I opened my mouth, that I coul
dn't remember what it was.
Chapter Five. Two Worms
During my fanciful and hectic redecorations at Bidnold, I had allowed myself to ignore the possibility that Celia Clemence would one day take up habitation under its roof.
Thus, although the house contained eleven bedchambers, none, in my mind, had been furnished for the woman Violet Bathurst jealously referred to as "Lady Merivel, Your Bride", but whose continuing existence was invariably absent from my mind. "Listen, Violet," I was in the habit of saying on the occasion of my Lady B's envious outbursts. "I am no more conscious of Celia as my lawful wife than Bathurst is of you as his. Rest assured that I never think of her."
Usually, Violet's jealousy would be assuaged by this statement, but one evening, even as I knelt over her and gently eased my tumescent member along the soft furrow between her breasts, she suddenly reached up and pushed me sideways, so that I would have fallen onto the floor had my right leg not been tangled in the sheet. "Your analogy with Bathurst," she said crossly, "is misleading and, if deliberately so, then you are a cruel and cynical man. For as you well know, Merivel, Bathurst has moments of remembering and at such times becomes importunate. On Wednesday night, for instance, lucidity returned to him in the middle of supper and he began crawling towards me on his hands and knees under the Dining-Room table, the while unbuttoning himself. If I had not quickly reminded him that his brace of woodcock – his favourite game – were getting cold on his plate, I simply do not know what might have happened. And so it may be with you, Merivel. That which you swear you have forgotten, you will one day come grovelling towards."
"Violet," I said, recovering my kneeling position (only disconcerted very mildly by the similarity of my stance to Bathurst 's under the table), "grovelling is a thing I have done but once in my life, when I inadvertently fell over at the King's feet. The notion that I will ever, as long as I am of sound mind, grovel to Celia is a pure fiction, not to be entertained for one second more!"
I put my mouth upon Violet's at this moment, thus preventing further speech, and the evening proceeded very pleasantly, Violet's sudden attack of jealousy having roused her to a wild and shameless abandon.
But even as I saw her into her coach, I found myself remembering Celia and wondering where, in the unlikely event of her unexpected arrival at Bidnold, I would lodge her. Had I not, on my strange wedding night, witnessed the immodest thrusting of her loins towards the King's mouth and heard through the closet door a wailing of pleasure worthy of an African wildcat, I would have believed Celia to be an entirely chaste and modest person, a person of sober taste and small appetite, finding comfort and contentment in a bedchamber hung, say, with pale apricot moire and ornamented by sombre prints of rivers and cathedrals. As it was, by the time I had ceased waving to Violet's gloved hand disappearing into the night, I had already decided that what I called the Marigold Room would be the one I would offer to Celia. Late as the hour was, I had my servants go up and light candles in the Marigold Room, so that I could take a look at it. I would have given the thing no thought at all but for Violet. For this one brief night, she had awoken in me a minute flicker of excitement at the idea of my wife's arrival. The next morning, however, Celia was once more consigned to that part of my brain I imagine to be like a coiled fistula, filled not with putrescent matter, but with utter darkness and into which so much of what I have once known is carefully crammed.
Now, here I am, in my torn stockings and with my bleeding hand, staring at my poor wife as she turns to me on the stairway and I read in her face some terrible calamity. "My dear!" I burst out, whipping from my pocket a plum-coloured silk handkerchief and fumblingly binding my hand with it. "Welcome to Bidnold! If you had given me a little warning, I would have made everything ready for you."
"I need no welcome," says Celia, and her voice is reedy, like the voice of an old dying crone. "The servants will show me to my room."
"Yes," I stammer, "or I will show you. It's to be the Marigold Room…"
My hand is bound now, but as I take hold of the banister rail and prepare to mount the stairs towards her, I see her recoil from me, as from some rearing viper. "Stay away!" she whispers, seemingly faint with revulsion. "Please stay away."
I stop at once and smile at her kindly. "Celia," I say, remembering her name at last, "you need have no fear of me whatsoever. I will never ask anything of you. All I wanted was to show you to your room, the colours and furnishings of which I hope may be of some comfort to you in whatever misfortune – "
"The servants will show me. Where is my woman, Sophia?"
"What?" I say.
"Where is my woman? Where is Sophia?"
"I have no idea. Did you bring her with you? She's your maid?"
"Yes. Call her please, Merivel."
I turn and look towards the front door. Two grooms are stumbling through it with a leather trunk, filled no doubt with ermine-trimmed bonnets and newt-skin shoes bought for his Dear One by my sometime master, the King. My mind is travelling in sudden sorrow towards a certain set of striped dinner napkins, now unused but kept folded in linen in an oaken chest, when I suddenly see Pearce, panting and wheezing like his late mule, arrive in my hall.
"Ah, Pearce." I say quickly. "Have you caught sight of a woman named Sophia?"
Pearce is blinking. His huge eyes, his prehensile nose and his long neck make him, on the instant, resemble a species of nocturnal tree-climbing animals I have seen described as marsupials (a strange word).
"No," says Pearce. "What is occurring, Merivel? I scent some misfortune."
"Yes," I say, "misfortune there does seem to be. But for now we must find my wife's woman…"
"Your wife is come?"
"Yes. Here she is. Go out to her carriage please, Pearce, and tell her maid that her mistress calls."
Pearce is wiping his eyes on his threadbare cloak, the better to believe that the ghostly woman in black is indeed Celia Clemence, last glimpsed by him laughing merrily at her wedding. I am about to urge him outside once more when a buxom, ugly, dark-haired woman of perhaps thirty-five appears, carrying two or three dresses in her arms.
"Sophia," Celia calls hoarsely, "come up."
Sophia looks from Pearce to me, seems immediately affronted by the sight of us both and so goes swiftly up the stairs to where her mistress is reaching out her hand.
At my side, emerged from I know not where, I now find Will Gates.
"Will," I say with great urgency, "please conduct my wife and her woman to the Marigold Room."
"The Marigold Room, Sir?" whispers Will. "Might I suggest another?"
"No, you might not," I snap.
Will glares at me but nonetheless, like the matchless servant that he is, goes nimbly up the stairs past the two women and with his habitual unflowery courtesy leads them onwards and up. The grooms follow with the heavy trunks and boxes.
I did not see Celia again that day.
After supper, which I took alone with Pearce, I enquired of my cook whether orders had come down for food. I was told that some bouillon and a plum tartlet had been sent up.
"Was it eaten?" I asked.
"Either that," said my wall-eyed chef, Cattlebury, "or the dog had it?"
"Dog?"
"Aye, Sir."
"What dog, Cattlebury?"
"Mr Gates, Sir, says they brought in a dog, a small Spaniel like the one as died on you, Sir Robert."
Ah, was my melancholy thought as I left the kitchens, the King is too cunning for us all! To those he knows he must one day abandon, he gives this sweet, living gift, just to be certain that our love for him remains with us (as if he could doubt that it would!) in case he may, at some future time, have need of us again. Poor Celia!
As I returned to my Study, where I had left Pearce reading some forgotten Latin text from my Padua days, I resolved that I must try, as soon as she would let me, to offer words of understanding and comfort, and in so doing perhaps find a little relief from my own despair. For there was no doubt i
n my mind now: the King had sent her away. She had played her part, just as I had once played mine, and now he had cast us off. I imagine him at dinner, his arm draped elegantly round Lady Castlemaine's white shoulders, the candlelight lending a seductive gloss to the little moustache he keeps so fastidiously trimmed. He leans towards Castlemaine, nibbles the emerald dangling from her ear. "What do you know of Norfolk, Barbara?" he whispers.
"Very little," she replies, "except that it is far from London!"
"Precisely!" smiles the King, "and therefore useful to me. It is there, you see, that I envoie all those I have begun to find tedious."
"Well," I said to Pearce, as I sat down in the Study, "I believe I know now for certain what has happened. What I greatly fear, however, is that Celia will believe her life is over. I really do not think she will ever be consoled."
Pearce (as is one of his irritating habits, detested by me since our student days) did not so much as glance up from his book when I finished speaking, but simply read on, as if I had not even entered the room. I waited. Sometimes I find Pearce so deeply annoying that, were I the King, I could have bouts of wanting to send him to Norfolk.
"Pearce," I said, "did you hear what I said?"
"No," said Pearce. "I didn't. I imagine it was some observation on your wife's plight."
"Yes, it was."
"Well, I have nothing to add. Fools such as you have become and courtesans such as she, once the whiplash of mirth or passion has died, invariably feel the scourge of the whip itself."
I sighed. I opened my mouth to discourage Pearce from further muddled metaphorical utterances of this kind when he lifted the little book he'd been reading and brandished it in my face.
"This is interesting!" he announced. "On the Cartesian question of spontaneous generation: 'For if generation of the lower forms is not spontaneous, then vermiculus unde venit? Whence the maggot?' "
I got up. "I'm sorry, Pearce," I said, my voice brittle and cold, "but I do not feel able, after the troubles of this day, to enter upon a discussion of maggots. I shall go and play my oboe until bedtime."