Restoration

by Rose Tremain

  And so to the third event of this month of July which, of all the things that have happened since I came to Whittlesea, is the worst thing, for now it haunts me continuously and I know that the shame it brings upon me is so great that were the Keepers to know of it, I would be sent out from here – my long friendship with Pearce notwithstanding – and ordered never to return.

  It took place on a hot night which seems to have been so short, it was as if there was no darkness at all, but only a fading of the sky and then a lightening of it again.

  I woke not long after midnight, having slept for only a few minutes. I felt full of trouble and fearful dreaming. Every part of me was sweating and filled with such an aching discomfort that I knew I could not lie another minute in my bed.

  I stood up and looked out of my window and all that my eye would light upon in this particular pale midnight was the door of Margaret Fell and I knew that my struggle against my lust for Katharine was lost.

  I put on a thin shirt and some breeches and then I let myself quietly out of my room and paused and listened in case any of the Keepers was stirring, but the house was silent except for the sound of Pearce's snoring.

  Once out in the night air and feeling its sweetness upon my face, all fear of what I was about to do left me, so that I did not go to it with trepidation, as I should have done, but with a false joy, pretending to myself that it was an honourable thing and a thing that would bring peace and rest.

  I opened the door of Margaret Fell and went in, closing it behind me. I did not move, but stood in the darkness until I could see the two rows of sleeping women. I looked over to where Katharine lay with her doll and her green embroidered slippers that she now also cradled to her and to which she sometimes spoke, as if to a child.

  She was sitting up and looking over to where I stood. I did not go to her. I waited. She put down the slipper she had been holding and got up and came towards me. I saw the woman lying next to Katharine wake up and stare at her and then at me, but I paid this other person no heed at all.

  As Katharine came close to me, I reached out for her with my left hand and with my right hand I opened the door to the operating room of Margaret Fell where only a short while ago I had helped perform an autopsy and wrapped a dead woman in her winding sheet.

  The floor of this room is stone and on this stone I knelt down and pulled Katharine down by me and kissed her mouth and then her breasts. And both of us tore from the other our clothes, being very full of greed and readiness. And naked together we crawled into the dark space under the operating table. And there, it seemed, Katharine imagined herself once again above the vaults of a church, for she began to whisper to me that at last we were together in God's house. And though God may never forgive me for this, I confess I was excited by this blasphemy, and I did with Katharine in the space of an hour everything she asked of me and more that my own mind could devise. And this was no simple Act of Oblivion, but a love of the most Profane kind.

  Chapter Twenty. John's Ladle Almost Taken from Him

  This night began what I now call my Time of Madness at Whittlesea.

  There had been a Time Before. In the Time Before, as I have shown you, I believed that all my dealings with the Keepers and with the inmates were true and honest. I did not dissemble. I took out my lost skills from the darkness to which I had consigned them and laid them at the service of the community. I had been renamed and I strove to become worthy of that name. And if the old Merivel sometimes reappeared, sighing over his lost past, he also tried to make himself useful, as on the afternoon of the tarantella. As Pearce said of my oboe playing, it was evident to all that I was "making progress."

  That "progress" could not continue after I entered the operating room of Margaret Fell with Katharine, for from that moment I became addicted to my own foulness so entirely that my mind, instead of contemplating the work of each day, was filled up with it and I entered willingly on the most terrible deceptions just to come to it again.

  When I woke, on the morning after that first night, and remembered what I had done, I felt mortally afraid. I knelt down by my bed and confessed to God: "I have suffered a contamination of madness and now I am unclean and full of the Devil, but I will not do those things again, if you will help to drive the Devil from me!"

  When I went down to breakfast in the kitchen, Hannah remarked that I looked pale, and I admitted to the Friends that I did not feel well that morning, it proving very difficult for me to swallow the porridge set before me, or even to hold my spoon because of a trembling in my hands.

  I did not shun the work of the day, however, which included an airing for the inhabitants of William Harvey – always a most difficult and lengthy task, for before they can be brought out into the air all of them must be washed, some of their own excrement. And as the day progressed, the fear and shame by which I had been overcome upon waking gradually went from me and were replaced by a most acute longing to go into Margaret Fell and seize Katharine roughly by the hand and push her before me into the dark room and begin again on the shameless acts I had promised that morning to renounce.

  And so began the pattern of each day during the Time of Madness: each morning, I vowed I would never, as long as I lived, touch Katharine again nor let her hand seek me out; each night, I lay and waited without sleeping for the moment when I could slip out into the darkness and go to find her.

  It was soon known by the other inhabitants of Margaret Fell what kind of acts we performed in the operating room and the women would sometimes cluster by the door, listening, and when we came out some of them would claw at me, at my mouth and at my sex, and beg me to take them also. And this longing that they had and their knowledge of what I was doing made me feel very sick and afraid, for I knew that sooner or later some behaviour or word of theirs would betray me to the Keepers and I would be sent away. I was deceiving Pearce (perhaps for the first time in my life, for I had never before pretended to him that I was leading an honest life when I was not) and I was deceiving Ambrose and the others, who had taken me in and tried to make me one of them. But more terrible, perhaps, than either of these deceptions was my deceiving of Katharine who, finding herself in love with me, asked me to swear that I was in love with her and that, if the day came for me to leave Whittlesea, I would take her with me. And so I swore. But the truth was that I did not love her at all. Pity had drawn me to her, and my own lust, suddenly a most overpowering and demented thing, kept me there with her in the darkness. And when I asked myself whether, in time, I would grow to love her, I knew the answer: the possibility of my growing to love Katharine was as remote as the possibility of Celia growing to love me.

  I had gone on, undiscovered in the Time of Madness, for about five weeks when, returning one night to my room near one o'clock, I heard a voice call out, "Merivel!"

  I stood on the landing, shivering a little, certain that Robert had been found out at last and was being summoned as Merivel to be given his punishment. I waited and the voice called again, "Merivel!" And then I recognised it as Pearce's voice and I moved slowly towards his room.

  I opened the door. He had lit a rushlight by his bed and was lying on his side with his face very near the taper and he held one of his thin hands out towards me, palm upwards, in the gesture of a beggar.

  "John," I said, "what do you want?"

  "Merivel…" he said again, and his voice sounded thick with his old catarrh, "I was waiting for you…"

  "Waiting for me?"

  "To come in. I heard you go out and I waited for you to return, so that I could call you and not wake the others."

  "Yes," I said. "I go and walk in the air sometimes at night, if I cannot sleep…"

  "I heard you."

  I went nearer to Pearce. I know him so well that I can discern anger on his lips before he has uttered a word and I looked hard at him to see if it was there or not. It was not there, and the relief I felt was very great. What I could see, however, as I approached his bed, was that his face was running
with sweat and that his cheeks (usually of such translucent whiteness it is difficult to believe that Pearce spends any of his time in the open air, let alone a great part of his day hoeing and pruning in his vegetable garden) had a hectic bright redness to them, the two things announcing to me at once that he had a high fever.

  I went to him and laid my hand on his forehead. My hand burned.

  "John…" I began.

  "Yes. Very well. There is some fever. I was about to tell you that. I did not call you to repeat to me something I already know."

  "Why did you call me, then?"

  "I called you because…"

  "What?"

  "I cannot find my ladle. I think it has fallen and rolled under the bed."

  I knelt down and felt about in the dust under his wooden bed, but could not discover it. I moved round and round the bed, searching under it as far as my arm would reach, but the thing was not there.

  "I cannot see it, John."

  "Please find it, Merivel."

  "Why do you call me 'Merivel'?"

  "Did I call you that?"

  "Yes."

  "When in truth you are… who? I cannot for just this one moment remember your other name."

  "Robert."

  "Robert?"

  "Yes."

  "And yet tonight, since this fever began… that name Robert seems to have slipped away from my mind and what I remember is Merivel and how we once together witnessed a very miraculous thing and that was a visible beating heart. Do you recall that?"

  "Yes, I do, John."

  "And you, because I could not, put your hand in and touched it."

  "Yes."

  "Yet the man felt nothing."

  "He felt nothing."

  "So pray for me, that I might become that person."

  "Why?"

  "To feel no pain in my heart or anywhere."

  "Are you in pain?"

  "Have you found the ladle?"

  "No. It does not seem to be under the bed."

  "Please try to find it."

  "I do not know where else to look. Where shall I look?"

  "Ssh. Don't raise your voice. You will wake the others."

  "I shall wake the others unless you tell me about the pain. Is it the pain you had before, in the lung?"

  "Could anyone have stolen my ladle?"

  "No. And I will find it for you. Where is the pain, John? Show me or tell me. Where is it?"

  Pearce looked up at me. His faded blue eyes, in this dim rushlight, looked a darker colour than they were. He withdrew his hand and placed it, in a hesitant way, against his chest.

  I stood up. I told him I refused to continue my search for the ladle until I had listened to his breathing. Then I gently helped him to turn onto his back and folded back the bedclothes and laid my head (which a mere half hour ago Katharine had taken in her hands and forced to suckle her breast like a baby) first on his sternum and then lower on his diaphragm.

  I found Pearce's ladle under his pillows and handed it to him. I told him I was going to boil water for a balsam inhalation, then I left him for a while and went to my room and washed myself, for the smell of Katharine seemed to cling to every part of me. I put on a clean nightshirt and combed my hair. Only then did I go down to the kitchen and begin to prepare the only remedies I and all the world of medical science could offer for my friend's condition, knowing as I worked that this time they would not be strong enough to make him well.

  What I began that night and what we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, continued between us for ten days and nights was a constant vigil at Pearce's bedside.

  On the fifth or sixth day, the pain of his breathing became so great for him that he whispered to me: "I would not have imagined longing, as ardently as I do, for my last breath."

  We gave him opiates and as these entered his blood (there to be circulated to every part of him, as proved by his beloved mentor, WH) he seemed to fall, not into a sleep, but into a kind of dream of the past, so that he babbled to us of his mother who had been a widow for twenty years and who said prayers every day of her life for the soul of her dead husband, a barber, who had left her nothing but the tools of his trade with which, as soon as her son had been accepted into Caius College, she cut her own throat. She was buried not in the churchyard beside her husband, but "at a crossroads, distant from the village; a place where people on foot or on horseback or in carriages went this way or that, but did not stop." He told us how, if we opened his Bible at Matthew, Chapter Ten, we would find "the imprint of a bird across the writing." He said he could not remember what species of bird it was, only that it was small and that he had found it "freshly dead when I was a child and my mother still living." He seemed very anxious that we should see this imprint, so I took up his Bible and searched for it and found eventually – not in Matthew, but across two pages of Mark – a brown greasy smudge, such as might have been made by the accidental placing on the Holy Book of a hot cinnamon pancake. I showed it to Pearce. "Is this it, John?" I asked. He stared at it, his dilated pupils having difficulty focusing upon it. "Yes," he said at last. "The viscera were removed, for I did not want to pollute the words of Jesus. And then I laid the bird in and opened out the wings and closed the book and put weights upon it and pressed it like a flower."

  I looked up at Hannah, who sat on the other side of Pearce's bed, bathing his brow from time to time with lavender water. She shook her head, showing me that she did not think this story about the pressed bird could be true, both of us being obliged to imagine the stench of the dead creature as it decayed in its tomb of sacred words. Had Pearce been well, I would have made the observation that the scent of death in a vertebrate does not resemble at all the scent of death in a flower, but, very far from being well, Pearce was by this time so weak that he could barely raise his head from the pillow, onto which what remained of his thin hair was gradually falling out.

  The knowledge that Pearce was going to die was, during those ten days, like something draped round me, something that I wore but refused to take into my mind. And I do not think that this refusal was based upon any false hope that Ambrose or I could save him. What I had understood, I believe, is that no amount of knowing in advance that I was going to lose my friend could adequately prepare me for the actual loss of him when it came.

  On the seventh or eighth day of Pearce's sickness, both the pain in his lungs and his fever diminished for a while. He asked me to lift him up and prop him with cushions "but not any with tassels or jewels on them or any gaudy ones such as you had in your house." I smiled. I put my hands gently into his armpits (where there seems to be no flesh any more, only a webbing of skin) and pulled him towards me while Daniel set some pillows at his back. I asked him if he would try to eat a little broth. He said he would and Daniel went down to fetch it for him (there is broth always ready in this household, the boiling of bones with onions and greens being a very frequent sight in the kitchen), thus leaving me alone with Pearce.

  I sat down beside him, just within reach of his breath, which smelled of sulphur. He began to talk, quite lucidly, just as he once did at Bidnold, about the theory of spontaneous generation, in which he has never truly believed but which seems proven by the appearance of the living maggot upon dead matter. "Is it possible, Merivel," he asked, "that the maggot is not spontaneously generated but – as has been hypothesised – emerges from an egg so small it cannot be seen by the human eye?"

  "I think it is possible, John."

  "And thus, it would follow, if the human eye cannot see these infinitely small things, there may be other pieces of matter of whose existence we have not yet the slightest perception, would it not?"

  "It would."

  He sighed. He was silent for a long while. Then he said:

  "It troubles me to take with me to my grave so much that I do not know."

  "I would rather you did not talk about the grave, John," I said.

  "Of course you would," he said acidly. "There are many matters, ever since I met you,
on which you would have preferred me to remain silent. But that has not been my way. And now, there is one uncertainty I do not wish to carry with me. And that is what is going to happen to my things."

  "What things?"

  "Those few that are precious to me. You once called them my 'burning coals' in order to mock me."

  Daniel arrived at this moment, thus sparing me the humiliation of having to compose yet another apology to Pearce, the syllables of which I find so difficult to pronounce, when what I longed for was for Pearce to beg my forgiveness for the thoughtless act he was about to commit: the act of leaving me.

  Daniel set down a tray, on which had been placed a bowl of broth and a spoon and by the side of this a greenish fruit that Pearce immediately recognised as one of his own pears. He picked it up and felt it in his hand, then held it to his sore nose and sniffed it. "The perfume of pears," he said in the rapturous voice that always brought back to my mind our river excursions and Pearce's excess of joy at the sight of a mayfly, "I have loved for years."

  Daniel grinned at me, then sat down beside him to help him sip the broth. Somewhat to my surprise, Pearce asked him gently to leave so that he could talk to me alone. The boy got up at once, passing me the spoon, and went out.