by Rose Tremain
I sway to my feet. "A pox on wisdom!" I shout. "Let us all play at mares and stallions!"
"Ole!" cries Winchelsea and stamps his feet like a dancer of the Flamenco (feet that are perpetually kept, I must add, in extraordinarily high-heeled shoes, Winchelsea not being as tall as he would wish) and at once the whole company falls to clapping their hands and stamping, all that is except an obese elderly man opposite me who has turned to Lady Winchelsea and with his fat hands removed her left breast from her dress and is holding it, as if it were an object of immense weight and value – a ninepin made of solid gold, say.
I lean over to get Lady Winchelsea's attention.
"My Lady," I say, "your neighbour has appropriated something of yours!"
She looks down. She sees her white bosom cupped in her neighbour's florid hands. She gives me a smile of haughty disdain. "Yes," she says, "naturally, he has."
I then feel myself punched hard in the small of the back by a man I knew at Court, an effeminate cavalier by the name of Sir Rupert Pinworth. "Legends!" he says. "Did you not know they were legends, Merivel?"
"What are legends, pray?" I ask.
"Frances Winchelsea's bosoms. Are they not, Frances?"
Lady Winchelsea grins at Pinworth. Her neighbour has now placed his quivering lips around her nipple. Taking no more heed of this than if he had offered her a bowl of radishes, she nods and leans back in her chair and extracts from her bodice her other breast, upon which there is a most fetching brown mole.
The company has not ceased its stamping and clapping, but now most have turned their gaze upon Frances Winchelsea and are applauding her bosoms. I look at Winchelsea. Though somewhat discomforted by the fact that Bathurst 's stallion is backing into his chair, he, too, is applauding. And I suddenly feel most exceedingly stupid. Everyone at the table but me appears to take it quite for granted that Frances Winchelsea's breasts will be displayed and admired in the course of any evening where she is present. I realise all at once how my long sojourn in Norfolk has severed me from the sources of gossip and "legend." I no longer know what is being done or said in high society. My face is burning. I cannot describe to you how foolish I feel. I hide my embarrassment by burying my face in my glass and quaffing yet more champagne.
When I look up again, I see that Lady Winchelsea's breasts have been put away, but that her elderly neighbour is still leaning towards her, his mouth a-dribble. To cheer myself up, I have a wager with Pinworth that the old man's hand is upon his prick. I hear myself bet twenty shillings and sixpence. Pinworth guffaws very prettily, showing his elegant teeth. He pushes back his chair and scrambles under the table. He re-emerges quickly, his face aflame.
"Not merely upon it, Merivel!" he declares. "But entirely around it. He has taken the ancient thing out!"
"Then you owe me money, Pinworth!"
He giggles. He informs me he has no money whatsoever, but lives entirely off the favours his beauty can command. "Do not underestimate beauty," he declares. "It is the hardest currency to be had." He is lying about the twenty shillings and sixpence but, before I can upbraid him, he fixes me with his languid brown eyes and says: "I hear your wife is very beautiful."
I look quickly at Violet, to see if the word "wife" (the mention of which causes her such a deal of anger) has reached her ears, but she is not at her place. She has risen and is attempting to restrain Bathurst 's stallion, the eyes of which are wild and white and which looks as if it will rear or bolt any minute.
Knowing that it is only the quantity of wine I have drunk which prevents me from feeling apprehensive about a sudden death by trampling, I return my attention to Pinworth. "Yes," I say, "Celia is a most pretty woman."
"But," says Pinworth, "I also hear she won't let you lay a finger upon her!"
It is at this moment that Violet succeeds in leading the horse out, Bathurst being now so drunk, he is a slack heap upon it, and so, for some new distraction, the guests now cease their clapping and stamping and turn their attention to me and my role as cuckold which, it seems, is known throughout the land and appears to be a subject that is aired as frequently as Lady Winchelsea's nipples.
I am bombarded by questions. Even Lady Winchelsea's elderly neighbour takes his eyes from her long enough to enquire of me: "How does it strike you, being locked out of the bedroom?" I am about to reply that I give the matter no thought whatsoever, but it seems that I'm not allowed to speak, but only to be the butt of jokes and questions. As is my way, I smile good-naturedly When I am told that I would be a good subject for a play, Sir Willingly Deceived, I slap my crimson thigh and guffaw in agreement. "I would be flattered to be portrayed in a play!" I hear myself declare, but in truth, drunk as I am and eager as I was this night to engage in exorbitant revelling, I feel my good humour being suddenly pricked, as if by a brittle shard of ice. And I know only I feel this. Still grinning, I look from one face to another. What I see behind the smiles and what I hear in the laughter is pity.
Later that night, while the servants toil to set to rights the hall, most horribly awash with spilt wine, vomit and flux from the horse, I am half carried to Violet's satin bed. Excited by the success of her party, she is hot and amorous. Her hands explore me. I feel her breasts touch the moths. I look down at her arched back, the strength of which I have often found strangely arousing, but feel most peculiarly numb, as if my whole body had been enfeebled by a kind of paralysis.
"Violet," I whisper, "I have drunk too much, I must sleep."
"No, you must not," says Violet, "not yet." And she falls to work upon me with great zest. After a deal of time, I am hard enough to take somewhat feeble possession of her, but alas, my heart is not in it and I am immediately limp again, thus rousing Violet to terrible anger. "What is the matter with you, Merivel?" she demands to know. "What in the world is wrong with you?"
"I am not myself, Violet," I mumble. "That is evident. But why, pray?"
"The wine…"
"Nonsense, Robert. You and I have been drunk many times."
"It must be the wine…"
But even as Violet goes to work on me once more, I know that it is not only the champagne I have drunk that has made me such a poor lover. Something else has afflicted me. Partly, it is the realisation that I am, at dinners and soirées in London and elsewhere, an object of pity. I believe, however, I could endure this with fortitude and good humour had the thought not entered my mind that, in my relationship with Celia, I now had cause to pity myself. Poor Merivel, goes my little lament, he has married the woman with the most beautiful voice in England and she cannot bear him to come near her! She is in his house and yet, as long as he lives, he will never touch her, never place a kiss upon her hair, even, or feel the touch of her white hand on his flat and ugly face…
"That's somewhat better," I hear Violet say, as she pauses in her whore's antics.
Alas, alas, my heart is saying, how excellent a thing it might be if, in my journeying from bed to bed, from Meg to Violet to Rosie Pierpoint, I could pause at the door of the Rose Room. I knock courteously upon it and the door is opened and she draws me inside, my wife, and I sit and caress her feet while she sings to me and then, not with my normal haste and flurry, but with a calm dignity, I stand up and kiss her mouth and she puts her arms round my neck, and up and down the corridors of the great houses there is no mockery or pity, for at last I am standing where the King stood, loving the woman he loved but to whom he married me…
I make love to Violet. She caterwauls like an Infidel, but I am silent, thinking my new thoughts.
I was not fully recovered from Violet's party for two days, at which time Farthingale reminded me curtly that it was Christmas Eve.
I try, in my life, not to think very frequently about my mother, finding myself distressed not only by my memory of her death but more horribly so by my memory of her hopes for me, by her belief that one day she would be proud of me. But at Christmas, it is difficult to prevent my thoughts from returning to her, and they did so again as the yea
r of 1665 approached.
She would, on the birthday of Christ, allow herself what she called "an extra helping of prayer." At the time of the Civil War, she would pray for peace. Always, she asked God to spare me and my father. But at Christmas, she talked to God as if He were Clerk of the Acts in the Office of Public Works. She prayed for cleaner air in London. She prayed that our chimneys would not fall over in the January winds; she prayed that our neighbour, Mister Simkins, would attend to his cesspit, so that it would cease its overflow into ours. She prayed that Amos Treefeller would not slip and drown "going down the public steps to the river at Blackfriars, which are much neglected and covered in slime, Lord." And she prayed, of course, that plague would not come.
As a child, she allowed me to ask God to grant me things for which my heart longed. I would reply that my heart longed for a pair of skates made of bone or for a kitten from Siam. And we would sit by the fire, the two of us, praying. And then we would eat a lardy cake, which my mother had baked herself, and ever since that time the taste of lardy cake has had about it the taste of prayer.
On Christmas Day, then, kept inside the house by rain falling hour after hour from a black sky, I sat alone in my Withdrawing Room, thinking about my mother and trying to compose a plea to God, assisted by morsels of an excellent lardy cake which I had ordered Cattlebury to bake.
After an hour or more, I found I had consumed the entire cake and still had not been able to formulate my prayer. In truth, I did not know what I was asking for, or rather I knew and yet knew not. In a kind of desperation, I abandoned all idea of talking to God, but knelt down by the fire with my head stuffed into a chair (as if resting upon my mother's lap) and spoke mumblingly to her. "Guide me, my sweet departed mother," I said, "for the idea of reciprocity has entered my mind. It is creating there a yearning no longer to be Merivel, the Fool, but to be…" (here, I had to pause and shovel the last crumbs of the lardy cake into my mouth) "… to be Merivel, the proper man."
It was, as you see, not much of a prayer at all, but it was the best I could manage, at least for the time being. I got up off my knees and was about to go and sing a little to my bird, which, if my eyes are not deceiving me, is becoming somewhat thin and bedraggled in this English winter (further proof that it is of Indian origin and thus pining for the heat of the Ganges delta) when Will Gates entered the room, carrying in his hands a most exquisitely worked leather box.
"Something come for you, Sir," said Will. "From London and the King."
Will amuses me with his Norfolk way with language. I took the thing from him and set it on a walnut card table. The box was tooled in gold and hinged with brass. I lifted the lid. Set out on a velvet cushion was a set of silver-plated surgical instruments.
Will gasped. "What are they, Sir?" he asked.
"Was there a letter with them? No card?"
"No, Sir. Nothing. Only the box. Tell me what they are, Sir Robert."
"They are surgical tools, Will," I said, "used in dissection and cuttings. With these you might remove a stone from a man's bladder, let blood from the vena saphena, lance an apostem, or sew together the two sides of an open wound."
"God save us!" said Will.
"Indeed," I replied. "Indeed…"
And then I took them up, one by one, the hook, the probe, the cannula, the perforator, the hammer, the osteoclast, the dipyrene, the spathomele and, last of all, the scalpel. I turned each one round in my hands and looked at it. I had never seen a set of instruments so perfectly crafted. I am willing to believe that neither Harvey nor Fabricius ever possessed any as fine. There was no doubt in my mind that they had come from the King. It was not necessary for him to send any message with them. They themselves were the message. Returning the scalpel to its velvet cushion, I saw, however, that its silver handle had been engraved with the date, December 1664. I turned it and found on the other side a marking of four words.
I held the thing up and saw, written on the handle of this sharpest and most terrible of blades, this terse exhortation: Merivel, Do Not Sleep.
Chapter Nine. The Overseer
With January came the kind of ferocious winds my mother had mentioned in her prayers for the chimneys. Norfolk people call these gales "The Russian Wind", for this is where they come from, it seems, down from some petrified icy mountain range (the name of which I do not believe I have ever known) and across the northerly oceans to howl round our houses for days and nights together, like the howling of bears and wolves.
Though not as susceptible to cold as, say, Pearce (who can catch any ague from a mere draught) I nevertheless began to notice a most miserable ache in my bones, relief from which could only be had by sitting in a hot bath and having Will rub my backbone with a sponge.
I thus fell to wondering how the men and women of All the Russias survived the dead chill of the winter. I endeavoured to picture in my mind a people I knew nothing of. And this is how they appeared to me: their faces were rubicund and fleshy, all bearing a strong resemblance to the landlord of the Jovial Rushcutters. And their bodies – even the bodies of the women – were fantastically draped about with furs of every kind, furs not fashioned into coats or cloaks but simply hanging and dangling here and there, so that they looked like paupers in tatters, but were inside this assortment of animal skins most comfortable and cheerful.
Now, in my occasional visits to Meg, I let go my stories about the Land of Mar and began a sequence of inventions I entitled Merivel's True Tales of Russia, which succeeded most well with her sweet gullible mind. But more than this, I began to imagine how much more contented all of us at Bidnold would be if we were warm and so placed an order for a large assortment of furs with an ancient London furrier by the name of Jacob Trench. I requested that Trench sew a motley of skins together into simple tabards "to be placed over the head and hang upon the shoulders, thus leaving the wearer's arms free for such tasks as his station in life dictates, but keeping his trunk warm."
Trench being old and meticulous and used to making ermine cloaks and the like, fussed me with tedious letters, requesting that I stipulate precisely what furs were to be used and in what quantities and what colour and quality of silk and satin I required for the linings and furthermore suggesting that I come to London with my staff for individual fittings.
Though I felt most vexed by the delay, I could not behave discourteously to Trench, he being such a trusted friend of my father's. I decided therefore to simplify the operation. I instructed Trench to use only badger skins and to line the tabards not with silk or satin but with a sturdy wool cloth, "such as may be worn even by my groom and my scullery boy." The cost of the tabards was going to be considerable, but so vivid had my imaginary Russians become that I had convinced myself that I at least could not survive the winter without this peculiar garment of fur. The idea, furthermore, that we could wait out the spring dressed as badgers delighted me considerably. No more would I be told I must be quiet to chance upon a badger in the woods of Vauxhall; I would become a badger.
Meanwhile, we waited. Ice formed in the well and the ravaging frost made cracks in the roof tiles. A chimney pot came hurtling down and decapitated a guinea fowl. "How slowly, how slowly time passes," said Celia, warming her hands by the fire. "How shall I endure it?"
There was indeed a kind of sameness to each day. In the mornings, I would persuade Celia to come to my Music Room and sing. My oboe practice had increased tenfold. I would rise at dawn, in the freezing dark and take up my instrument and struggle with scales and arpeggios until the sun crept into the sky but, despite this, I was unable to accompany Celia with any grace at all and, whenever I attempted to do so, she would cease her singing almost at once and pray me not to bother. Thus, there was not, of course, the duet that I had fancifully imagined, but only Celia's voice, singing alone, singing of lost love, while I sat on a chair and stared at her white throat and wondered if time or chance or "the changeful nature of all things" would ever allow me to put my lips tenderly upon it.
At n
oon, I would dine with Celia, but these meals were becoming irksome to me, owing to the constant presence of Farthingale who was growing more odious and ugly as the days passed, but from whom Celia would seldom permit herself to be parted.
In the afternoons on fine days, I would ride in my park, urging Danseuse to her splendid gallop. Celia's little dog, Isabelle, whom she could not be bothered to exercise, ran snapping at our heels for some of the way and when we outran her would turn and trot home to her mistress who sat dreaming by the fire in her room, reading the poetry of Dryden or doing her eternal petit point.
There was no doubt, Celia was languishing. She was polite to me because she believed the King had made me her overseer. Upon my report of her depended her return to London – or so she understood it to be. But I knew what I was to her: I was a penance she had to endure. I was as irritating to her as my oboe playing, as ugly and discordant. The idea that she could ever love or respect me, I now saw was utterly preposterous. I was on the point of abandoning my ploy to keep her at Bidnold beyond the King's stated time when a most strange incident occurred.
I had spent an evening in my Studio, trying to draw in charcoal the Russians of my unreliable imagination, abandoning my hopeless smudges and scribbles at last towards midnight. I undressed and put on my warmest nightshirt and a nightcap with a little lining of rabbitskin, got into my turquoise bed and fell at once into a heavy sleep.
I woke in some confusion. A hand was pressing my shoulder and a voice was urging me to wake up. I opened my eyes and saw Celia, wrapped in a cloak, bending over me. She was holding a lighted candle and her long hair fell loose about her face, like a curtain.