by Rose Tremain
The broth was hot. I did not want Pearce to burn his mouth on it, so I took up a spoonful and blew upon it before guiding it to his lips. Silence descended upon us for a few moments as we both concentrated on the task of the spoon-feeding. But the effort of taking in sustenance seemed to weary Pearce very quickly and he told me to take the tray away and fetch pen and ink and paper instead.
What I wrote – although I do not have the paper before me, having been instructed to give it to Ambrose – I can remember very exactly, for it was perhaps one of the shortest wills ever made, Pearce's burning coals having diminished, as it were, to a mere few cinders. He bequeathed all his books, including his Bible, to Whittlesea House. His clothes – those threadbare garments that he wore without the least tremor of embarrassment or shame – he offered "to the inmates of our Hospital, so that they may put on the garments of a true Quaker and be tender towards each other", and the ladle he left to me, "this fragile thing perchance being of comfort to him sometimes." And this was all. The last line I was ordered to write stated that "John Joseph Pearce, Quaker, possesses of his own no other thing or things upon earth."
When I had written down everything (in the careful script I am capable of if I take extreme care with the position of the quill in my hand) I gave the paper to Pearce and helped him to sign his name. I made no comment upon his gift to me of the ladle, being so saddened and troubled by it that for a short while I could not speak. When I found my voice again, it was to offer Pearce a taste of the green pear, which he declined fearing, he said, that it would give him a pain in his teeth.
Since the night when Pearce had called out to me on my return from Margaret Fell, I had not visited Katharine. I had made a bargain with God: I would not touch her nor let her come near me again if He would give me Pearce's life.
I knew it to be a futile thing. I knew that Pearce was dying. Yet I kept to it. And Katharine, finding herself abandoned by me, came up to the house from the Airing Court and beat on the door with her hands and screamed out for all the world to hear that I was her lover. And that night, the ninth night of Pearce's illness, I and the Keepers sat quietly at supper, they looking at me sadly but saying nothing until the end of the meal when Ambrose spoke. "When the time is right for Robert to speak to us," he said, "then he will speak to us."
And I nodded. And we all rose and began to clear away the plates and dishes.
They knew that I could not leave Whittlesea until Pearce was gone.
He died in the quiet time between the Night Keeping and the dawn of the eleventh day.
I was with him, alone.
I closed his mouth. I took up his thin, white hands and folded them across his chest. And into his hands I put the ladle.
"Look," I whispered to him, "the ladle will not be taken from you."
Then I closed his eyes. And I sat down. And it was then that I was aware of the silence, and I knew it would be there for ever, and that whenever I thought of my friend or spoke to him in my mind, I would hear it again, and where before there had been answering words or messages of guidance or sniffs of disapproval, there would henceforward be only this: the Silence of Pearce.
I sat on the hard chair, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, and cried. I did not try to stem my tears nor mop them up with any handkerchief or striped dinner napkin, but let them fall onto the floor and onto my thighs and run down my legs.
When I looked up again, there was a milky light at the window and Ambrose and Edmund and Hannah and Eleanor and Daniel were there with me in the room, standing by the bed with their palms pressed together in prayer.
A coffin was made for Pearce that day by two men from George Fox. It was too large for him, but we put him in it and packed his body round with branches of pear.
We held a wake in the parlour and this wake took the form of an all-night Meeting, during which, as and when we were moved to do so, we spoke of him or said prayers for his soul.
I tried, without saying any words, to gather into me what I could remember of his wisdom and what came to my mind was his despair at the greed and selfishness of our age which he believed was like a disease or plague, to which hardly any were immune, not even the poets or the playwrights, "because, Robert, even the creative spirit is whoring, and Piety, the mother, has given birth to Luxury, the wanton Daughter…" And these thoughts comforted me a little because through them it came to me that the things which Pearce had loved about the world had been so few – the tenderness of Quakers, the wisdom of William Harvey, the memory of his mother, the growing of trees en espalier, the light on a trout stream -that, though he declared himself to be afraid of death, he must also very often have longed for it.
I was trying very hard to imagine him in Paradise (I have frequently tried to envisage my parents here, but all my mind is able to conjure up is the Vauxhall Woods and I am inclined to doubt whether, if Paradise exists, it would resemble a place where Londoners go to have picnics), when Daniel suddenly said: "It has come to me from the Lord that John Pearce taught me many things by the example of his life and the greatest thing that he taught me was never to be blinded by affection, because it was his way to judge most harshly those he loved most, and so his loving of them never hurt them but only helped to strengthen them." I looked up and saw that Daniel was looking at me, and Ambrose, too, glanced at me, as if the two of them were waiting for me to speak.
I felt very hot, just as I had at the Meeting where I had suggested the story-telling and the dancing, and so I suspected that some words were going to come out of me, but did not know that when I spoke them they would reveal to me something that I had not, until I uttered it, understood. I wanted to stand up, but my legs felt very weak, so I continued sitting down and then I said: "In the silence which has fallen since John died this morning, I have listened and waited. It is as if I have been waiting for some word, not from John, nor from God, but from myself to myself and now it has come…"
Still, I did not know precisely what the supposed "word" was or what I was going to say next. I paused and took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow, and then I said: "In this quiet, I have understood one thing. And it is this: that all my love for women which, before I came here, was a very trumpeted and tempestuous thing, and even all the love I thought I had for my wife, Celia… all these loves were mere deceptions and not love at all, but only vanity and lust, for which I am ashamed. And in all my life I have truly loved only two people on earth, and these two are John Pearce and the King."
At the shock of hearing the King's name put beside Pearce's, all the Friends raised their eyes and cast upon me their sternest looks. I opened my hands in a gesture of helplessness, "You will straightway say," I continued, "that my love for John Pearce is worthy and my love for the King unworthy and that I should, as indeed John often told me, cast it out from me. But it seems that I cannot. For whatever I do and however far I travel from my former life, I still find it there. But it is no longer a greedy love. It asks nothing. It is like the love for a dead man; it is like my love for John. For I will see neither man ever again. I will never be with them. All I understand tonight is that these two people I have truly loved – wisely in one particular, unwisely in the other – and that no one else on earth has ever counted as these two have counted with me. And for this knowledge, which may have come to me from the Lord or from some other place, I feel grateful."
The flush that had come into my face and body subsided after some minutes, despite my awareness that the eyes of all the Friends were still upon me. The air was very close with their displeasure and I expected them to start speaking out against me. But they did not. And I imagined each one of them wrestling with his or her anger and conquering it for the sake of quietness and for the sake of John.
And so the night went on and became morning and at six o'clock, we drank some chocolate and ate some biscuits which seemed to me to taste most strangely of charcoal.
Towards midday of the tenth of September, Pearce was put into his grave and the ye
llow clay of Whittlesea packed tightly around and above him. I had made certain that the ladle was put into the coffin with him before the lid was nailed down.
But at the graveside I found myself remembering how, at Cambridge, some cunning thieves calling themselves "Anglers" had tried to steal it and all Pearce's possessions from him. They worked with a long pole, on the end of which was a hook made of wire, and such a pole had been thrust through Pearce's open window one night while he slept. He had woken up to see a chair moving in a glimmer of moonlight three feet off the floor and floating out through the window. "It was only," he told me, "when the pole came back into the room and I saw it move towards my ladle that I understood there were villains at work and not ghosts. And so I cried out angrily, and my shouting frightened them and they ran away." He laughed when he had told me this story and then he said: "Perhaps it is always easier to frighten away the living than it is to frighten away the dead? What do you think, Merivel?" But I cannot remember what I answered.
Chapter Twenty-One. Katharine Asleep
As you will have noticed by now, I have no great gift for solitude. After the death of Pearce, however, a longing to be alone began to possess me.
If I had still had my horse, I would have ridden out of the gates of Whittlesea and turned northwards and gone on until I came to the samphire fields and the dunes and the sea. What I would have done when I got there, I cannot say. Perhaps I would have sat down on a jetty smelling of tar and looked out towards Holland and turned my mind to the King's war for which my house and lands were helping to pay. Perhaps I would simply have sat down and remained sitting until I was mistaken for one of the Idle Poor and sent by an Overseer to a workhouse.
At all events, I could not get to the sea. I walked vainly out along the causeway to Earls Bride, but the sight of this sad place made me turn back. On my return, I had a waking dream of the empty, circular room in the West Tower at Bidnold. It was a dream of a place of light.
I returned to my linen cupboard and lay down on my cot and there was a silence in the house which soothed me for a little while. But then I began to hear all the accusations and lamentations to come, and I put my hands over my face. When I thought about Katharine, I felt cold and sad in all my limbs. She repelled me. No longer did I pity her, even, because it was for her sake that I was about to be driven away from Whittlesea and put back into a world where I had no place. And I had begun to believe that she – no less than those lost to a violent insanity, such as Piebald – was indeed corrupted by devils and that the evil in her had infected me and made me play the beast with her and that when I did these things I was not myself, but a man possessed by Satan. Pearce, by dying, had made me turn aside from my foulness. He had saved me. What I longed for now was to be quite alone with the memory of him; yet what awaited me was Katharine's pleading for one kind of love and the Friends' sadness at my betrayal of another.
I got up off my cot. I went out into the soft soundless rain. I walked to Pearce's grave and stood and looked at the letters of his name which have been burnt into a thin cross made of willow wood which, as the seasons pass, will surely warp and bend and become pale and so start to resemble his actual body. "John," I said, "I do not think that I shall ever find peace."
Some days after the burial of Pearce, I told the Friends, at the end of a Meeting, that I was ready to speak about the sins I had committed, but I requested that I should be allowed first of all to talk to Ambrose privately. There was some opposition to this, it being the Keepers' belief that secrets are very venomous things, "likely to bring illness and even death to any group or corporate body where they are permitted to breathe." But they had seen how greatly I had been affected by Pearce's abandonment of me and so granted me what I asked, out of sorrow at my weakness.
The parlour fire was lit, the autumn evenings now seeming chill. Ambrose seated himself before it and I knelt on the hearth rug like a penitent, warming my hands.
Though very filled with a nervous sickness, I began to speak with a strong voice. I told Ambrose that it was in my nature to be immodest and lecherous and how, as a young man, I had neglected my work at St Thomas 's to go in search of women in the park and take them back with me to my rooms at Ludgate. "My fall from the King's favour, the very thing that made me take the road to Whittlesea," I said, "was caused by lust. Though I had promised never to lay hands on my wife, my desire for her became so great and importunate that I could not stop myself from trying to touch her, thus making myself utterly ridiculous, causing her a deal of distress, and bringing the King to a great fury. So you see, Ambrose, that this greed I have to possess women has been a bitter enemy to my prosperity and indeed to my reason. There have been times when, recognising this, I have found myself lamenting the fact that women had ever been created!"
I paused. Ambrose nodded. This nod of his made me want to ask him whether he had ever had a similar thought, but I did not, it seeming very unlikely that this immovable crag of a man ever suffered the torments of this kind of temptation.
"When I came to Whittlesea," I went on, "I believed that all of what I had been in my former life I would no longer be. I thought Whittlesea could re-make me."
"And has it re-made you, Robert?"
"It has re-made parts of me. John understood this when he told me I had made 'some progress'. And perhaps – though he never spoke of it – he knew that I would be tempted by Katharine and that I would resist, but that eventually my resistance would falter."
"And if he had seen it falter, he would have felt betrayed by you Robert."
"Betrayed?"
"Yes. For it is understood by the Keepers of Whittlesea that we stand towards those we protect as parents towards children. And for the parent to lay any hand on his child for his own pleasure and satisfaction is a betrayal of the most horrible kind."
I sighed. I was forced to admit to myself that this was indeed how I had thought of Katharine and it was for a "child" that I had made the doll, and thus the Time of Madness with her now appeared to me more foul than ever and Ambrose's sternness with me entirely justified.
I had not seen Katharine for several days, having been asked by Ambrose to stay out of Margaret Fell. He now described to me how – since my betrayal of my trust -Katharine could not be induced by any means, save the giving of laudanum, to sleep and how, day and night, she repeated my name and asked for me and shrieked and sobbed and touched herself indecently and how my very name had become synonymous with her madness so that the women of Margaret Fell told the Keepers she was suffering from a "lunacy of Robert, a most terrible derangement."
This description made me feel so afraid that all strength went out of my voice and I longed to curl up into a cowardly heap at Ambrose's feet (remembering for a fleeting moment that I had once lain thus before the Royal footstool) and be covered by absolute silence and darkness. Aware of my fear no doubt, Ambrose reached out and put his large hand on my shoulder.
"I know," he said, "that you are sorry for what has happened. We love you and we forgive you, Robert."
"Thank you, Ambrose."
"But I also know that you will want to make amends, and it has come to me from the Lord how you are to do this."
"It has come to you from the Lord?"
"Yes."
"What has He said? What am I to do?"
"You are to leave Whittlesea."
"I know. I knew that I would have to do this."
"But not alone. You are to take Katharine with you."
I looked up at Ambrose. I swallowed. I put my fists together and held them out in an attitude of supplication. "Ambrose," I began, "please do not ask me to do this…"
"I am not asking. The Lord is commanding."
"No! He would not…"
"Did He not hear you say that if you could cure one of them and see him walk out from here you would feel useful again?"
"Yes. I said that – "
"And He heard you. And now He has made it possible for you to achieve the thing you hoped fo
r."
"But Katharine is not cured…"
"Not yet. But the means have been found. You have found them and only you hold them. The means are you."
"No, Ambrose!"
"Love is the means, Robert. If you love her, she will sleep and when she has learned to sleep she will no longer be mad."
"And besides, she is yours entirely now, for she is expecting your child."
That night, I did not sleep.
What passed through my mind I cannot remember. All I know is that I was filled with a dread of the future so profound that all my life until that moment appeared to me to have been filled with a happiness I had never perceived. When George Fox first heard the word of God, coming directly to him, he declared that from that moment "all the creation was given another smell under me than before", and now I felt as he had felt, except that he had begun to smell the newness and freshness of things and what I had begun to smell was despair.
When Ambrose told Edmund and Eleanor and Hannah that "Robert is not shirking his responsibility towards Katharine," they were very tender in their behaviour, smiling sweetly at me and promising to pray for me. Only Daniel looked at me sadly. "It's a shame," he said, "that you were never able to teach us the game of croquet."
During the days that remained to me at Whittlesea, I tried to decide what road I would take when I went out from there, whether north to the sea or north-east to Norfolk or south to London, but I had no appetite for any journey nor for any arrival; I was filled with a loathing for my life. And so I chose the road to London, remembering the plague there and imagining that in the pestilence resided the ending of my story – an ending I had brought upon myself.
The Keepers fetched Katharine out from Margaret Fell. They bathed her and washed her and combed her hair and put a clean dress on her. And they gave her Pearce's room to sleep in, promising her that I would come to her and comfort her "with the tender love he feels for you and the child", and that, so comforted, she would indeed sleep.