by Rose Tremain
As I began to sew up the dead woman's chest, I now said as much to him. "You of all people I did not think would be afraid of it, John," I said. And he nodded. "Until recently, I was not," he said, "but for a month now – and I am telling this to you, Robert, and to no one else, for I do not want to trouble the others – I have felt certain symptoms come upon me, certain symptoms…"
"What symptoms?"
"Well… this catarrh of mine…"
"It's no more than a catarrh."
"And a very cold sweating on the crown of my head…"
"Just part of the rheum or catarrh, John."
"And a violent coughing and choking at night, with much pain in my lung."
"Pain in your lung?"
"Yes."
"How great is the pain?"
"Sometimes so great that I want to cry out."
The flesh of the dead woman, pinched between my finger and thumb for the suturing, was icy cold and I now felt slide into my heart a cold worm of fear.
I stared at Pearce. "Are you telling me that it is pain in your lung that has given you thoughts about dying?" I asked him.
"Yes. For it does not seem to go away. Nor this cold sweating of my head, despite the hot weather."
I said nothing. I finished sewing up the wound and together Pearce and I washed the woman and inserted wads of flax into the damp orifices of the body and put the winding sheet round it. Then I said: "Let me come to your room after the Meeting this evening, and I will examine you."
"Thank you, Robert," said Pearce. "And you will tell no one?"
"No. I will tell no one."
"Thank you. For they are such good people, are they not? I would not have them lose any sleep on my account."
I had been troubled all morning by thoughts of Katharine, my lust for her being of that most loathsome kind, where the very feelings of loathing seem to excite rather than to repel.
Now, hearing that my friend was ill, everything went from my mind, and I wished only for the day to pass so that I could make my examination of Pearce and allay his fears and mine by discovering in him some ague that would soon leave him – and nothing more.
The Meeting, however, was longer than usual that evening. After some moments of silence, Edmund stood up and said that he wished the Lord's forgiveness for what he was about to say, that he knew that the agitation he was in was unworthy and childlike, but something of great magnitude had begun to trouble him and that was the loneliness of Quakers.
He paused for a moment. No one asked him any question, but waited in silence for what he would say next. Then he took out of his pocket a crumpled piece of parchment and read some words as follows: "The Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people's hearts; for both Stephen and the Apostle Paul bore testimony that he did not dwell in temples made with hands, not even in that which he had once commanded to be built, since he put an end to it; but that his people were his temple, and he dwelt in them."
After this and in some distress, so that his rodent's eyes began to brim with tears, he said: "It has come to me, not from the Lord, but in some very fearful dreams I have had, that for every other kind and condition of worship there is some steeplehouse or temple or shrine or actual place where the faithful can go in, as if going to God's house like a visitor and where, outside of himself, he can feel the presence of God, his host. But for the Quaker there is no such place and if- as I have felt in these dreams of mine – he has some sudden perception that God is not there within him any more, where shall he go to find Him? He cannot go to God's house, for what he is is God's house! So what shall he do? Please tell me my good Friends, how shall he overcome his isolation and his loneliness?"
Edmund then sat down and blew his nose and as he fumbled for his handkerchief, his piece of parchment fell to the floor and for some reason this letting go of a thing that was precious to him, more than his anxiety or the words he had spoken, made me feel a great kinship with him and I would have stood up and tried to answer his question if I had had any notion of what the answer might be.
Some more silence lay on us then, but it was broken after a few minutes by Ambrose who reminded Edmund that Fox had warned us not to rely upon dreams and had said "except you can distinguish between dream and dream, you will mash or confound all together." And so a discussion of dreams began which lasted some while: how there are three sorts of dreams, one kind being caused by the business of the day and another being the whisperings of Satan and a third kind being true conversations between God and man.
Because I am still plagued with dreams of my past, with dreams of Celia in fact and of course of the King, I began privately to wonder in which category these dreams fell and so lost the thread of the meeting for a while. When I once more gave it my attention, I saw that it had become very passionate with, not only Edmund crying, but Hannah also, and Eleanor kneeling and taking up her Bible and declaring to us all that to enter the Book was like entering God's house and to begin to read from the Apostles was to feel a welcoming hand taking us in and guiding us and offering us nourishment "as we would offer cakes or broth to a visiting Friend."
This reminder to Edmund that if God mysteriously went missing from him, he could start to find him again in the Scriptures seemed to cheer and comfort him somewhat. I thought that the Meeting might end then, but it was Eleanor's request that we should spend five or ten minutes each seeking out some verse of the Gospels that was and always might be of particular comfort to us. And so we each went to fetch our own Bibles and then sat round in our semi-circle and made little readings from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All the Quakers, including Edmund, found passages most appropriate to what had happened during the Meeting about Jesus loving especially the poor and the childlike and saying, "Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden" and, "Suffer the little children" and so forth. But when it came to my turn, I chose the verse from Luke, Chapter Two, which describes the mortal fear of some common shepherds at the sight of God's messenger angel: "And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid…"
I do not really know why I chose it, except that I seem to have known it by heart all my life and that I wanted to say to Edmund that God surely frightens us and makes us feel lonely just as often as he comforts us. Such fear, as in the case of the shepherds, may be a prelude to a revelation of great importance, but then again it may not be. In my own case, it is usually fear of suffering and death and a prelude to nothing at all.
I bade goodnight to all the Keepers. I went to my linen cupboard and lit my lamp and I took this with me to Pearce's room, so that we had two lamps by which to work. I also took with me my surgical instruments, cleaned meticulously these days, with their silver handles polished.
As Pearce sat down on his narrow bed, I said: "I'll wager you have caught a summer chill and this is all."
"No," said Pearce, "I have had chills before and this is not one."
"Well, let us see…"
I began by taking up a tongue depressor and looking down Pearce's throat, which did not appear inflamed though I noted that his tongue was a little swollen and coated and that his breath was foul. I then examined his neck for swellings and found none. Then, guided by his hand, I put my hand on that part of his head that felt cold to him and through his thinning hair felt it to be moist, as if there was a sweating there.
This done, I asked him to take off his coat and shirt and to lie down on his bed, so that I could listen to his heartbeat and his breathing.
While he undressed, I made notes about the strange moistness of his head, the cause of which I could not at first fathom. Then I looked up.
Pearce stood before me, folding his shirt into a bundle, wearing only his frayed black breeches and stockings. I thought back to the last time I had seen his arms and chest unclothed, which was during my vigil at his bedside in the Olive Room at Bidnold. He had been as thin then as
he always was as a young man, but now the change in his appearance was distressing beyond words to behold, for he was like a veritable skeleton, with his chest quite concave and every rib visible to me, seeming to have no covering of soft warm flesh on him at all, rather his bones appearing held together by his white skin.
"Pearce…" I stammered, forgetting in my shock at the sight of him, his constant entreaty to me to call him John.
"Yes," he said, "I know. I am grown a little thin."
"A little!" I blurted out. "What has happened to you? Have you been fasting?"
"No, I eat what is put before me. I do not know how this weight has been lost."
"Lie down!" I snapped.
Obediently, Pearce set aside his bundle and lay on his back on his bed. I brought the two lamps as near to him as I could and looked down at him and, truly, I wanted to cuff him about his head for allowing his body, invisible to us all inside his baggy clothes, to waste away to this degree.
I took up his wrist and felt his pulse and was relieved to find it quite strong. Then I bent over him and put my head on his chest and heard his heartbeat against my ear.
"It is the lung you should be listening to," said Pearce.
"I know," I said crossly. "Inhale deeply and exhale as slowly as you can."
The intake of breath was not smooth. It had a kind of spasm to it, as if there was a sobbing in the body.
"Inhale again and keep on with slow breaths until I tell you to stop," I instructed.
I listened for several minutes, moving my listening position a little after every second breath, then I told Pearce to turn over and I put my ear to his back, which is a most wretched part of the man, being very scabby with pimples, and all of what I heard made me afraid, for I was in no doubt that the lungs were in distress, having in them a quantity of mucus or phlegm which, if it is not got out, will in time fill all the lung tissue and bring the sufferer to a cruel death like a slow drowning.
"It is a poisonous congestion, is it not?" said Pearce, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, which I now saw were very heavy with tiredness.
"Yes," I said.
"And the sweating and coldness in my head?"
"Probably a beneficial evacuation. A means by which the matter is endeavouring to come out."
"And if it does not come out?"
"We will bring it out. But you must rest, Pearce."
"John."
"John, then! But you will be neither one nor the other and no name will matter one whit, if you allow yourself to die!"
"I cannot stay in my bed, Robert, when there is so much work to do here."
"You must stay in your bed, or the remedies I shall prescribe will have no help from you, only hindrance."
"No, I cannot. For we must reveal nothing of this to Ambrose or the others."
"Pearce," I said crossly, "please do not make me lose my patience! Have I not, a hundred times since we met at Caius, allowed you to command me and let you be wise and done this or that thing at your bidding? I have! So do not even consider contradicting me on this score. For I am determined you will do this one thing that I am ordering you to do, and that is to stay here in your bed and let us care for you and not to stir from this room till you are well. And if you do not do this, John, you will no longer be my friend or any true Friend to Whittlesea. You will be in your grave!"
Pearce then allowed his head to fall back on his pillow and he nodded. "Very well," he said, "but only for a little time. What will you prescribe?"
"Syrup of roses to warm your blood and soothe your coughing. A burdock poultice or a bread poultice for your head."
"And for the slime in the lung?"
"Sal Ammoniac."
"And a balsam?"
"Yes. We shall try several, dissolved in boiling water and inhaled."
"Good. It has all returned to you then, Robert?"
"What has returned?"
"The right knowledge for the right time."
"Perhaps."
"As of course it had to. For we can never truly unknow what we have known or unsee what we have seen, can we?"
"Probably not, John," I said. "Now please do me the favour of taking off your breeches and putting on your nightshirt."
Two weeks passed, during which I wished to turn all my thoughts and all my strength to the cures I was trying upon Pearce. But they were weeks in which I found myself subjected to a great clamouring from the people of George Fox and Margaret Fell who, whenever I went among them, begged me to let them come out and dance once again, informing me that dancing was the only cure for them and that all their madness was caused in the first place by the absence of music.
I laid the problem before the Keepers, but none had any solution. That the tarantella had had some beneficial effect on those allowed out that afternoon seemed certain; what was also certain was that, in those we had kept chained up, the music and clapping and shrieking had engendered feelings of rage and despair that took many days to subside.
Suggestions were made. Edmund declared it might be feasible to chain the inhabitants of WH one to another and lead them out across the Earls Bride causeway, out of earshot of the music. Hannah ventured that we could give them opiates to drug them to sleep. But we held back from approving either of these ideas, the reason being that both of them made us feel uneasy.
And so the clamour for the dancing went on and with it a clamour of another kind, which was from Katharine, who truly believed herself in love with me and whom I could not approach without she entreated me to touch her. The sight of her black hair, her strong legs and her full breasts began to occupy my mind to such a horrible degree that even as I sat at Pearce's bedside and covered his head, while he inhaled my balsam preparations, or I laid poultices on his crown, I would feel this clamour of Katharine in my body and I would grow hot and sometimes breathless and sick in my stomach. Then, silently, I would curse the day I had taken pity on her, and feel scorn for myself in the realisation that even in this action I had been moved by words once spoken to me by the King, so that even at Whittlesea – far, as I thought, beyond his reach – I was not yet entirely free of him.
Several visitors to Whittlesea were turned away by us during this time, our fear of bringing in the plague still being very great. One of these visitor's was Katharine's mother. She had brought her daughter a honeycomb and a pair of green slippers with some fine embroidery on them. When Ambrose informed her that she could not come in, she grew very angry and declared that all who care for the mad and the sick, though they pretend to be charitable people, are the greatest deceivers of the age, their only aim being to line their own pockets. She walked away still cursing Ambrose so violently that she, too, appeared to be touched with madness.
Eleanor gave the honeycomb and the green slippers to Katharine. When she knew that her mother had been turned away, Katharine began to cry. She told Eleanor that a cure for her condition existed in the world but that we were all too blind to see what it was.
July came in and, in this month, three things of importance took place.
The first of these things was the arrival of another letter from Will Gates, informing me that my horse, Danseuse, had walked in through the park gates at Bidnold "a little lame in her left hind leg and with no bridle on her, but only a saddle, twisted round." Will asked me to write to him, to tell him I was alive. "If you are alive, Sir," said the letter, "I will continue to keep and hide your horse from the V. de Confolens, so that you can get her for you again. But if, as I fear, you are dead, I will send W. Jossett, your groom, with her to the King, so that His Majesty can know of your sad end."
This letter, if I had not been so very preoccupied by the condition of Pearce and by the behaviour of Katharine, would have gladdened my spirits a great deal, not only because it made me laugh, but also because the news of Danseuse's return seemed to me miraculous and therefore to portend some good. As it was, there did not seem to be adequate space in my mind for the tidings that it contained.
Keeping a
n afternoon vigil by Pearce's bed, while he slept his snarling invalid's sleep, I wrote a short letter thanking Will and enclosing money to buy oats for my horse. "I do not know," I said in this letter, "how or if ever I shall come again to Bidnold, so if I have not come there in the space of one year from now, please return Danseuse to His Majesty the King and say that I am no longer in the world."
The second thing of importance was the beginning of a recovery in Pearce. I confess I felt not only relieved that my friend seemed to be retreating from a premature encounter with death, but also gratified that my syrups and balsams, my insistence upon rest and good nourishment (I had devised for Pearce a very good diet of coddled eggs, boiled meat, chicory and malted bread), were the means by which he seemed to be returning to health. When I listened to his breathing now, I could still hear a wheezing in the lungs, but the balsams and the Sal Ammoniac had helped him cough up a great quantity of phlegm from them and the burdock poultices had turned the moist patch on his crown to a dribbling sore, from which much foul matter was able to come out.
After three weeks, in which he slept every afternoon and was content to let us bring him his meals and to wash him and comb his sparse hair and generally care for him like an infant, he began to protest that he was cured and ready to resume what he called his "proper task, which is not the comforting of myself, but the comforting of others." So we let him get up and helped him to put on his clothes that were still very much too large for his thin body, despite the eggs and the malted loaves, and he came downstairs and went out into the sunshine and asked me to walk with him to the vegetable garden so that he could see his pear trees.
It is a feature of Pearce's character, as I think I may already have told you, that he believes himself to be the only person upon earth capable of carrying out certain tasks, one of which is the cultivation of fruit trees en espalier. It was thus that he expected, after three weeks' absence from them, to find his trees dead and shrivelled, and when he saw that they were not, despite the great heat of the last month, he assumed at once that it was God who had saved them and he knelt down in the vegetable garden and gave up thanks to his Maker when, in reality, he should have given up thanks to me and to Edmund who had spent many tedious hours watering the wretched trees, aware as we were of Pearce's wrath and sadness if we should let them die. I was tempted to inform him of this, but I did not. I stood and watched him praying and I knew that, as always, my irritation with him would not last, it being so diluted by my affection for him that it is like a single drop of aloes in ajug of mead. So, instead of reproaching Pearce, I, too, found myself conversing with God, who seems nearer to me here that He ever seemed at Bidnold. I asked Him to bring my old friend back to perfect health and I added: "I will remember to call him John, Lord, if you will remember to put some flesh on his bones."