by Rose Tremain
"This," said the man in the tabard, "is the Airing Court. We believe in the healing property of air."
"This is where they walk?"
"Yes. Round the tree and then round again, and so on, round and round, but the tree is not dull. It is a most restless and changeful tree. You see?"
"Yes. And now the spring is – "
"My name is Ambrose Dyer. I should have mentioned this at very first, for names are important with us."
"I am glad to meet you, Mr Dyer."
"And you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your name?"
"Ah. Robert Merivel. Pearce and I were medical students together at Cambridge."
"John. We do not call him Pearce. He is John. And I am Ambrose."
"I believe, to me, he will always be Pearce. As he, in turn, addresses me as Merivel."
"Here, he is John."
"So I must be Robert?"
"And I am Ambrose. Now I shall name for you our buildings. The house itself we call Whittlesea House and this is where we, the founders and keepers, six in number have our rooms and where we eat together. And the three barns or asiles, meaning places of shelter, are called George Fox, and Margaret Fell, and William Harvey."
Despite the trepidation I was feeling, I smiled to myself. Even here, in this lonely place with its one oak tree, Pearce had remembered his mentor, for of course it was true that he carried the great WH with him everywhere in his circulating blood.
"Which barn is called William Harvey?" I enquired.
"The smallest," said Ambrose, "to the left of us, here. Where those very deep into their madness are put."
At that moment, as we walked towards the house, Pearce came out of it. When he looked up and saw me he appeared to gasp for air like a fish. And then, as I predicted he would, he broke into a stumbling run.
That night, I slept on Pearce's bed, with Pearce lying on a pallet on the floor not far from me. My mind seemed to inhabit a place much stranger than the room, so that I did not feel as if I slept but only fell in and out of odd, dreamlike trances. Each time I believed myself to be near to sleep I heard an echo of the King's voice, repeating the same words again and again: "I have refined thee, Merivel. Behold, I have refined thee. But not with silver. Not with silver…"
PART TWO
Chapter Fifteen. Robert
A month has passed. April has come. And it is as if, during this month, since my arrival at Whittlesea Hospital, I have been absent from myself. This morning, however, seeing my reflection in the parlour window I once again caught sight of him: the man you know all too well by this time; the person I asked you to picture wearing a scarlet suit; the Fool Merivel. And I could not prevent a sentimental tenderness towards Merivel from creeping over my skin, causing me to blush both with affection and with shame. It is this tenderness that has led me to continue the story, notwithstanding the dismaying fact that when I passed through the gates of the New Bedlam, I passed from one life into another and thus an ending of some kind has been reached. Under these things you may draw a line: my house at Bidnold, the colours of my park, Celia's face at my table. Neither you nor I will see them again. They have been consumed, not by actual flames, as were my dear parents, but by the fire of the King's displeasure. I must thus imagine them turned to ash, and so must you, for you will not be returned to them.
I have become Robert.
No one at Whittlesea (not even Pearce, whom I must address as John) calls me Merivel and many do not even know that this is my name. I am not even Sir Robert. I am Robert. And this is how you may picture me: I do not wear my wig except at Meetings (these are most strange yet moving things, which I will later describe), I go about my work wearing black woollen breeches and a black woollen shirt which causes a vexatious itching of my nipples. These garments are covered by a leather apron, very heavy, that comes down to my knees.
My boots are low-heeled and of sturdy hide and ever soiled with the mud of Whittlesea, which is like no other mud I have seen, being blackish and slimy and drying – when it does dry – to a sulphurous yellow crust. My belly, grown very fat upon Cattlebury's carbonados and syllabubs, is shrinking on the poor diet of herring, frumenty, spoon-meat and water favoured by Pearce and Ambrose and the other Quakers. Even as a child, I was a mighty eater and the thinness of the food on which I am here forced to live causes me a deal of misery. Two pigeons are roosting in the poplar trees outside the Bedlam gate and I would dearly love to see their plump breasts roasted and set before me on a plate. But such thoughts I set aside, as I must also set aside a yearning (almost perpetual) to saddle Danseuse and ride away from here. For where should I ride to? All paths, outside this place, lead back to the King. This, at least, I have been permitted to understand. And so I remain, having no glimpse of any future.
I am allotted tasks, almost all of them of a menial and repellent variety and having some foul smell to them. But I perform them. The days I dread are those when I must work at William Harvey. Open the door of William Harvey and you are opening the door of hell. Yesterday, in William Harvey, a woman bit off the tip of her tongue even as I lifted her to put fresh straw into her pen and her blood spurted into my eyes and it was like a flame licking me and I felt a contamination of madness. The house is well named. There is an abundance of blood in it. There is blood in puddles on the floor.
There are many rules we must all obey at Whittlesea. One of these forbids any of the Keeping Friends (for so the small staff of the Bedlam quaintly call themselves) to go alone for any reason whether by day or by night into William Harvey. So it was that when the tip of the bitten tongue fell at my feet and I was splattered with blood, one Friend came quickly to my side. It was Eleanor who came, the younger of two sisters – Eleanor and Hannah – who are women of very sweet and sober disposition. She picked up the tongue tip and put it into her handkerchief and with admirable fortitude Pearce presently sewed it on again. But I prefer not to dwell upon that. I will, instead, tell you a little about these sisters and about the other Friends who make up this small company and who have under their care one hundred mad souls.
The Whittlesea Hospital was founded two years ago by Ambrose and Edmund. Its first occupant was Ambrose's grandfather, an old seaman who lost an eye to Spanish pirates and who, when the King returned, believed himself to have died. He lives quite happily in George Fox. He has an eye of glass that he keeps in a wooden box. He daily remarks that he expected the grave to be darker and more silent and is most glad that there should be company within it.
Ambrose, as noted at my first meeting with him at the gate, is large, obstinate, gentle and very hardy, like a plant with a great growth of root and an indifference to frost or heat or hail or drought. If all the world were to die of some epidemic, I do believe Ambrose would die last of all. Without him there would be no Whittlesea Hospital. Without him, Pearce would still be at St Barts in London and the others, Hannah and Eleanor, Edmund and Daniel, would still be waiting for the revelation of what they call "the True Work shown to us through the Seed of Christ, which is in all people".
Edmund is a man of my age who has twice been imprisoned for entering Anglican churches and causing harm to the clergy by the throwing of cabbages to their heads. He has most bright and round eyes and a high voice and is very fond of order and cleanliness, and will, when it rains in great sweeps across the Fens, take off all his clothes except a ragged pair of drawers and run round and round the walls, the while soaping his face and his torso and even his private parts. If Hannah or Eleanor should glance up and see Edmund engaged in these ablutions, I have noticed that they smile at each other and then look away and continue with their work, but that the smiles stay upon their faces for some while. It is as if they find, in Edmund's ritual, some innocent pleasure.
Both are large women with wide hips planted on sturdy legs. They wear sabots. Hannah's eyes are grey, Eleanor's blue. I believe Hannah to be thirty and Eleanor three or four years younger. They love the Lord with a great abundant lov
e and their charity towards His creatures is very bountiful. I do not believe I have ever met any women like them, for they seem to have no vanity at all, but neither do they pity themselves, nor will let anyone speak their minds for them. In the month that has passed, I have once or twice prayed to be ill, so that Hannah and Eleanor might nurse me. But most strangely, given the unhealthy Fenland air and the inadequacy of my meals, I have not been ill one day. I content myself by sitting near them at supper, for I find their stillness comforting.
The sixth member of the Whittlesea staff is Daniel. He is the youngest of them all and his face has that transparent quality of youth – as if only time will give it proper substance. He is no more than seventeen. Having seen nothing of the world, nothing that he sees causes him any fright or revulsion. He is accepting of all things. He does not flinch from what he sees and smells and hears inside William Harvey. And of the six Friends, he is the most accepting of me. There is no disapproval in him. While the others wish to convert me to Quakerism, Daniel does not. Rather, being told that I was once at Court, he asks me to tell him in secret what that world of the Court is and how men speak and how they dress and what things they devise as pastimes. So I find myself describing the game of croquet, and Daniel listens and repeats such explanations as "Red may now, having passed under the hoop, endeavour to roquet Black" with reverence, as if they were the Twenty-third Psalm. And the two of us are momentarily very happy until I remember that I no longer have any rightful place in the world where croquet is played and so would do best to forget its complicated rules. And so I break off and Daniel is, for a mere moment or two, cast down. "Why might we not," he asked me one day, "play a little croquet here, Robert?" I pretend to give this some thought before answering: "The sight of a croquet hoop would make John most unhappy, Daniel."
And so I come to "John", as I must now call my spindly friend, Pearce.
The joy and surprise with which he greeted me were soon enough superceded by a return to the severity with which he always feels obliged to treat me. As I expected, he was neither surprised by my fall from Royal grace nor sympathetic towards my distress.
"When I saw what your life was, in that terrible luxurious house of yours," he said, "I prayed you would be taken out of it."
"Yet I, Pearce, was uncommonly fond of it," I felt obliged to remind him.
"John," he said.
"What, Pearce?"
"Call me John, if you will."
"I am bound, after all this time, to find that difficult."
"You find difficult all that is simple and good, Robert. That is the trouble with you."
This conversation took place in Pearce's room late on the night of my arrival at Whittlesea, I resting my wind-buffeted body on his narrow bed, he lying on a pallet (such as is used by the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell) on the floor. I looked at him – my friend and my refuge! He is thinner than ever he was, so that the bones of his wrists resemble ivory bobbins. He is suffering, here in this low-lying land, from a very thick catarrh which causes bubbles of spittle to keep bursting at the corners of his mouth and which has quite silted up his sinuses, so that his voice sounds as if it was issuing from his nose. For this catarrh, he is dosing himself with mithridate which, in turn, has inflamed his eyes. He is, all in all, a wretched sight.
Though Quakers are not fond of sermons, Pearce lying on a straw mattress and dribbling mithridate into his nostrils, earnestly delivered himself of a sermon upon the perfidy of the Stuart Kings. "None of them were," he said, "nor none will ever be worthy of the nation's trust. For the good of the nation is never first with them. What is first is their supposed Divinity that puts them outside or above the law, so that in all their actions they are accountable to no one, neither in their public nor their private life…"
While listening to this sermon, I found myself pondering not the truth or otherwise of Pearce's words, but my own absence of anger in the whole disastrous matter. Wounded, disappointed, afraid, melancholy: these I am. What I do not seem to be is angry. So, refraining from agreeing or disagreeing with Pearce's diatribe against the Stuarts, I simply burst out: "Why do I not feel angry, Pearce?"
"John."
"John. Why do I not feel angry, John?"
"Because you are a child."
"I beg your pardon?"
"A child, punished by selfish parents, does not feel anger. It goes to its little private corner to weep. Exactly as you have done. And if the parents should again hold out their arms, why then the child will come running into them, all glad to be returned and forgiven for something it did only in answer to their greed."
"But Pearce – "
"Just as, if the King were to call you back, you would go running!"
"He will not call me back. It is quite finished."
"No. But were he to do so, you would go. And this is how it is revealed to me that you are still a child, Robert. But, mercifully for you, your state of homelessness brought you to Whittlesea. Our task here is to cure you of childishness just as we are trying to cure the lunatics of their insanity. For the man in you could be most splendid, Robert. I saw the shaping of the man – before you reverted to being the child – and it is that man we shall restore to you."
I glanced down at Pearce. I noticed that by him on the floor, within reach of his cadaverous fingers, he had placed his precious soup ladle. And I smiled.
After that first night, I found that Pearce was not interested in discussing my past life or my loss of it. He wished me to put it out of my mind, as speedily as possible and so from the following day (during which I was given the drab clothes I have described for you) I was expected to join in the work of the Keepers exactly as if I were one of them and a born Quaker.
"Robert is well qualified to help us," Pearce announced to Ambrose, Edmund, Hannah, Eleanor and Daniel over our dawn breakfast of barley and water porridge. "He is not squeamish or frail. He claims to have forgotten medicine, but I know that he has not. So let us give thanks to Christ that He has sent Robert to us and ask Him to sustain him in the work we shall find for him to do."
There followed prayers of touching simplicity. "Lord, send a light to show Robert the way," said Ambrose. "Dear Jesus, be with Robert," said Eleanor. "God in Heaven, take Robert's hand and be at his side," said Hannah. "And even when night comes, still be at his side," said Daniel. "Amen," said Edmund.
I look round at the little company. Alas, I think, they do not know me. I am John's friend, and he has vouched for me and so they have taken me in. But they do not know how afraid I am. They do not know that I have long been parted from God. They do not know there is a madness in me which renders grass and trees as lunatic lines and splodges. They have taken me in to Bedlam, but they do not know that my spirit rejoices in chaos. I am wrong for them and I will do them wrong, and they do not know it. I opened my mouth to begin upon telling them what kind of man I was, but no words came to me except mumbled words of thanks for their prayers, "for which," I told them, "I hope to make myself worthy." And I saw Pearce nod approvingly at my sudden humility.
And so my first day at Whittlesea began. In the company of Ambrose and Hannah I was taken on a tour of the Hospital. The rain I had been spared on my journey was now drenching the featureless plain, swept into squalls by the wind.
As Ambrose unbolted the door of George Fox and it swung inwards, I, all unthinkingly, hurried in to be out of the wet and so drew suddenly upon myself the nervous glance of some forty men lying in two cluttered rows the length of the barn.
At once, a commotion began. Some of the men stood up. I saw one clutch the hand of another, as if in fear. Some laughed. Others moved forward and stared at me, as at a strange exhibit. One rolled up his filthy nightshirt and giggled and bared his buttocks that were covered in sores. The stench of the place was very bad, the night pails being full and all the "Decayed Friends" (as Ambrose termed the mad people) appearing lousy and unwashed. But none was shrieking or crying, as I has been told the mad of the London Bedlam did
constantly. None was chained up, but could move freely about the big barn. And they were not in darkness. Four small, barred windows let sufficient light into the place for me to see that at the further end of it had been constructed a gallery, reached by two ladders and on this high gallery stood an enormous loom.
"I see there is a loom," I said to Ambrose. "Do these men weave things upon it?"
"Yes," said Ambrose, rubbing his large hands together. "The loom. Transported by cart from the workhouse shut down at Lynn."
My thoughts, which the man with the naked bottom still sought to preoccupy by jigging up and down in front of me, returned at once to Justice Hogg and my lost role as Overseer. Now, I would never succour the poor but serve the mad instead. But there appeared to be little difference between these two categories of people, many of the faces staring up at me having about them the same look of despair as I had perceived in the paupers gathering sticks near Bidnold.
"What is manufactured on the loom?" I enquired of Ambrose.
"Sail!" he said.
"Sailcloth? For Men-of-War?"
"No, Robert. For the fishing fleet at Lynn. They send us herrings in payment."
Ambrose then addressed the occupants of George Fox. He spoke to them kindly, as to a child, and they were mainly silent while he talked except for two at the further end who began to swear at each other in some of the foulest language I have ever heard. Ambrose instructed the men to roll up their pallets and take their slop pails to the cess pit and to put out the trestles for breakfast. I know now that this same routine is followed every morning, but Amrbose gave the instructions with great enthusiasm, as if he were announcing some happy new tiding. And indeed, when he had finished, one old man, around whose scrawny limbs were wound a great quantity of bandages, began to applaud. And Ambrose nodded at him and smiled. He then said: "And I will tell you now that great good fortune has come to Whittlesea. Behold Robert. He has come from Norfolk to help us all in our work for the Lord. Say his name to yourselves. Say Robert. And keep the name precious. Because he is your Friend."