by Rose Tremain
And so I was forced to go in to the room where my friend had died and there was Katharine sitting quietly on the hard chair where Pearce used to sit and read, his knees neatly together, the book held up to his nose, like a fan, the words of Harvey circulating so sweetly in his brain that it became oblivious to everything else.
When Katharine saw me, she rose from the chair and came to me and put her arms round my neck and began to sob and say Robert, Robert, Robert, twenty or thirty times. I held her. The dress she wore was made of clean linen and so the smell of Katharine was not the smell of her that I remembered. And for this change I was grateful.
I told her that we would be going away from Whittlesea. I told her that I loved her and that I would not abandon her.
That evening, she supped with us in the kitchen. She ate with a spoon in her right hand and with her left hand kept a hold on my arm. And that night, as Ambrose and the others had predicted, she went to sleep and did not wake till dawn.
The money that remained to me in the world was twenty-four pounds and three shillings.
With this, with my clothes and possessions put into two flour sacks, and with Katharine dressed in a woollen cloak waiting for me outside, I stood in the parlour of Whittlesea House, in the room of all the Meetings, and the Keepers came, one by one, and took my hand and bid me adieu.
The sorrow and disappointment that I beheld in their faces was a very terrible thing to endure and I wished for this leave-taking to be over quickly. But it could not be so, because there was a corner in each of their hearts that did not want me to leave and would rather have had me stay, my crime notwithstanding. And so they reminded themselves how the Lord had sent me to them "out of the windy sky", and how, in coming to Whittlesea, I had brought a great gift and that was the gift of my hands, which had helped them for so many months in their tasks of healing.
"How shall we manage?" asked Ambrose. "Now that mine are the only physician's skills? Pray for us, Robert, for life will be hard for us – without John and without you."
"Yes. Pray for us, dear Robert," said Hannah.
"And pray for me," said Daniel, "for if ever there is to be more dancing or skipping about, I will be the only musician."
"I will pray for you all," I said, "and remember you for ever, how you took me in and how it was never part of any plan that I had to betray you or make you ashamed…"
When Eleanor came forward to take my hand, as she spoke the words, "The Lord keep you, Robert," her eyes filled with tears and she looked down at my hands in hers, as if they were something precious to her.
"Do not cry for me, Eleanor," I said. "Please do not cry for me."
But she shook her head. "We will all weep for you sometimes, Robert," she said, "just as we will weep for John. For you are both lost to us."
So I walked out of the parlour for the last time and then out of the house and the Keepers came and stood in a cluster by their door and watched me go.
A cart had been hired for us. I threw my flour sacks onto it, then I took Katharine's hand and helped her up and got in beside her. I told the driver of the cart, a lumpish man with the fat buttocks of a woman, and his hair tied in a greasy bow, to make haste. I wanted to be gone now and not to look back. But the cart-horse was sluggish. We proceeded almost at a man's walking pace. And so, before we had gone very far out of the gate, I did look back. I turned and saw it all: the iron door with its inscription from Isaiah, where I had first gone in, the three great barns named by the Keepers after people who were sacred to them, the house that had contained my linen cupboard, outside of which the Friends still stood and watched me, and, beyond the walls, the cemetery where Pearce would lie for all eternity. On the day I had arrived there, I had believed myself the unhappiest man on earth. Now I knew that my unhappiness then was as nothing to my present sorrow, so that everything that I could remember about my time at Whittlesea seemed touched with a comforting light, as if it, no less than my time at Bidnold, was part of the day and what was falling upon me now was the night.
The actual night overtook us on our cart as we entered the town of March. I paid the man off. I knew I could not endure the sight of his fat rump for another day. He deposited us at an inn called The Shin of Beef and we were given a room that smelled of apples, a quantity of them being stored in it on damp trestles.
I knew we were in a poor place, badly run and neglected, but Katharine, having been out of the world for so long, believed it to be grand. She thought the apples had been put out for us to eat (there being no supper available to us, not even the poor cut of beef after which the miserable inn was named) and so she ate them greedily, one after another, until she vomited up a mess of them into the bed. In the cold of one o'clock a maid no older than twelve or thirteen came and took away the foul sheets and put on some that were clean but damp and in this cold dampness Katharine clung to me and kissed me and some of the devils that were still in her came into my blood on her saliva and so I took her at last but with my eyes closed, so that I could not see myself or her, and with my hands covering her face. And with her breasts pressed against my back, she went to sleep. But I could not sleep, for the cold and smell of the place and for the great choking of misery that was in my heart.
We were forced to wait in the town of March for two days for a stage coach that would take us to Cambridge and so on to London.
On the first of these days, a Tuesday, a market began setting up at dawn outside our windows and so I took Katharine out and we walked among the stalls selling honey and fruit and candles and skeins of wool and beeswax and we found a man who, for threepence, would imitate the cry or growl or squawk of any animal or bird. And this person mystified and delighted Katharine so much that I was forced to keep paying him money for one imitation after another and soon felt very foolish standing in a gawping crowd and listening to a man pretending to be a chicken and a hog and a capercaillie and a new-born lamb. After almost a quarter of an hour, I said to Katharine:
"We have heard enough now. Let us move on before he begins on all the beasts of Africa," but she begged me to let her hear one more thing and said: "You have not chosen any animal or bird yet, Robert, so now it is your turn." And so I took out another three pennies from my purse, and the man held out his leathery palm for them and said: "What is it to be, Sir? A screaming peacock? A howling wolf? Or – two for the price of one – an old sow and her suckling piglets?"
"The pigs," said Katharine, "tell him to be the pigs."
"No," I said, "not the pigs. A blackbird."
"A blackbird, Sir?"
"Yes."
"Well then we must have silence round about, we must have quiet among you good people. For the sound of the blackbird is a little thing and I cannot make it loud."
He persuaded the cluster of people round him to cease their chatter. He then cupped both his hands to his lips and through his fingers I could see his mouth making some ugly contortions. I closed my eyes and waited. And then the sound came, perfect and pure, and I knew at once that tears were coming into my eyes, so I quickly took out my handkerchief and blew my nose loudly, thus interrupting the blackbird imitation so rudely as to cause an outbreak of laughter in the little crowd. I then nodded to the man, who was scowling at me, and, taking Katharine firmly by the wrist, I led her away.
There being nothing whatever to do in March, I hired a rowing boat in the afternoon. The day was warm, like a day from summer suddenly come again, and I rowed downstream on the River Nene towards a place called Benwick. "It is too insignificant a village to attract to it any bird imitators," I said with a smile. But Katharine was not listening to me. She had put her hand into the water and seemed hypnotised by the sight of it and by the flotsam of leaves and waterweed that swam into her fingers. Her mouth hung open and she did not notice that her long hair had begun to trail in the river. Then suddenly she came out of her trance and laughed, and her laughter, which I had seldom heard at Whittlesea, sounded exactly like that of a child. But instead of feeling kindn
ess or pity for her childishness, I felt only a great weariness with time which, with Katharine as my only companion, seemed to pass so slowly that it was difficult to believe that the day's sun would ever go down or the night's darkness ever break into morning. I tried to comfort myself by imagining that, if time had slowed down, I would not get to old age until long after I had passed it. But this little conceit brought me a mere moment of solace, for I knew that I no longer minded about growing old or indeed cared much about whether I lived or died.
That night in the apple room, when I lay down on the bed, my shoulders and my back aching from my afternoon of rowing, Katharine came and stood by me and lifted up her skirt and told me to put my hand on her belly and complained peevishly that I had never done this nor wanted to do it and that therefore I did not love the child inside her.
I turned my head and looked at her belly and I said that I found it most difficult to love anything in advance of its being. But she did not understand what I meant by this and I had no will to explain it, so I soothed her by stroking her belly and she began to tell me everything she would do for the child when he was born and how she would let no one but me ever take him from her, for what she feared now was the jealousy of barren women who would come when she was asleep and steal her baby "and leave me with the nothing that I had." And so, to comfort her, I said – as if telling one of my Tales of the Land of Mar to Meg Storey – we would build a fortress round the child, we would put him in a high tower and let no one near him except ourselves, "so that not only will he be safe, he will neither see nor feel any of the unkindnesses of the world, nor its scheming, nor its ugliness, for everything he will see from the window of the tower will be beautiful…" And Katharine was so entranced by all this nonsense that she fell asleep standing up and so I got off the bed and lifted her up and laid her on it. And then I did not know where to put myself, not wanting to lie down beside her, so I sat down on the hard chair that had been placed near the window and thought I would look out at the stars and see whether I could find Jupiter and its little girdle of moons, but the window was grimy and all I could see was my own reflection in it and I saw, suddenly, how I had aged a great deal in a short time and how my face, which I still thought of as wide and smiling, had become gaunt and worried.
And my thoughts turned to Celia. I do not know if it was my search for Jupiter that brought her to mind or the changes I observed in an appearance that had always been so distasteful to her. I thought of my famous Letter of Apology to her which I had spent so many hours trying to compose, but which had never been written, a pathetic short note being sent in its place. So now, I wrote it in my mind. I told her I had understood that love puts reason to sleep. I told her that it was my misfortune now to be the object of a love I could not return and that the furies of guilt and the furies of loathing hounded me day and night and that the pain of these was as cruel as the pain of love itself. "And so I can measure now," I concluded in my imaginary letter, "how much I made you suffer, Celia, and for this suffering caused by me, I ask you to forgive me."
For reasons which I do not completely understand, this Apology to Celia took away from me sufficient of my anxiety for me to be able to fall asleep in the chair. But it was not a contented sleep, for during the night I had a sad dream of my mother, in which I went to speak to her in Amos Treefeller's old room but found that she could neither see me nor hear me and so, believing that I was not there, put on her bonnet and went out, leaving me alone.
The warm weather that had returned the previous day accompanied us on our journey to London and I noticed, as we came near to the city, that the grass beside the road was brown and parched and all the fallen leaves dry and brittle, as if no rain had come for a great while. I could see a little cloud of flies and insects outside the window of the coach, moving with us, so I enquired of our fellow passengers, "What has the weather been in London since the summer?" And they told me that you could not say what it had been "since the summer" for the summer had never truly gone, but stayed on "most sultry and horrid" and that no cooling breeze nor fresh shower had come to the capital for months, "so that the smell of the place is getting very foul and all who are wise are journeying out of it and not into it."
Once begun, then, on the subject of the weather, the people in the coach now became very talkative on the subject of the plague – as if they had longed for days and nights to describe it and dwell upon its horrors but had lacked any audience to listen to them. (I have often noticed how it is in the nature of many men and women to revel in tales of horror and misery, but I find it to be a very odious thing, and I know that one of the traits I admired in the King was the way he made light of his past sufferings and did not bore anyone with them.) It was told to us how, when plague came into a house, every person in it but the sufferer ran out of it, mothers abandoning their children, servants their masters, wives their husbands, "so that hundreds die alone each day and then they are not found and so their flesh rots and is preyed upon by rats who carry the germ back to the streets, and the stench of the dead in some parts of the city is beyond what you could imagine…"
I was tempted to say that, being a physician, I was quite familiar with the smell of corpses, but then I was glad that I had not made this reply, for our fellow travellers began to reveal to us the hatred that was felt for everyone in the world of medicine – from the surgeon to the apothecary – for their inability to find any means of prevention or any cure. "Doctors," announced a loud-voiced woman seated opposite me, "are become the people most despised in England." And she sucked on her teeth, loving the taste of the venom in her mouth.
We came at dusk into Cheapside, where Katharine's mother lived. We got out of the coach and the two sacks containing my worldly goods were handed down to me.
I stood still and took my first breath of the city. The scent of the air did not seem to have been altered by the presence of the plague. What I did notice at once, however, was a strange quietness in the street and beyond it, which was like the quietness of snow. It was as if the city had fallen into a trance, or else become a place that I was not really standing in, but only saw and heard from a long way off. I looked all around me. I could see a group of children running after the coach. I could see two women standing on a doorstep, one holding a baby. A cart, loaded with barrels, passed and I could hear the hooves of the cart-horse, but very quickly this sound and the sound of the children shouting faded and died and there was silence. I bent down to pick up one of the flour sacks. As I did so, I saw Katharine lift her skirts and squat down to piss into the gutter. "When you begin to carry a child," she said, "you do your business wherever you can and you cannot wait." At that moment, her mother came out of the house. She put her hands to her mouth and stared at the daughter she had given to the Keepers of Whittlesea, then crossed herself, as if in fear. Katharine, red in the face from the exertion of emptying her bladder, looked up at her mother and began to laugh. And I do not think I have ever witnessed – between two people long parted from each other – a more awkward meeting.
The mother is a tall, fleshy widow of forty or forty-five. She likes to be called by her two Christian names, Frances Elizabeth, as if they were joined together to make one name. She makes a living by writing letters for those who cannot read or write, but I have seen her writing and it is an ugly hand and her spelling is poor. A little sign by her front door reads: Frances Elizabeth Wythens. Letters Written. One penny per line. She learned to write, not from any school or teacher, but from her dead husband, who was a clerk in the Office of Patents. "He was," says Frances Elizabeth to me on our first night in her house, "a most conscientious scribe."
The house is narrow and dark and over-heated by the fires she keeps burning, one upstairs and one down, as a prevention against the pestilence, which has already visited two families in Cheapside. The place smells of smoke and of old varnish and camphor, and the windows are narrow and grimy. The room we have been given reminds me a little of the room I had long ago at Ludgate, wh
ich is only a short walk from here. In my bed there I knew oblivion of the very sweetest kind, but in this one I cannot seem to come to any unconsciousness or any forgetting. I lie awake and listen to the silence that has fallen upon London. It is Katharine who sleeps. Her tangled hair falls onto my shoulder and her arm is laid across my breast.
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-Two. A Prophylactic
Not long after our arrival in London, while on an errand to buy ink for Frances Elizabeth, I met a group of men attired in rags and scourging themselves with cruel little whips, like the Flagellants of the Black Death in 1348. We were in Change Street and I presumed they were going up to St Paul 's church to pray for an end to the pestilence. And so, finding myself very curious to know what solace this hurting of their flesh afforded them, I followed them.
I noticed that whatever people we met coming in the opposite direction looked on these Flagellants with great fear, as if they themselves could be the source of the plague germ, and they crossed the street so that they would not come near them. And I thought how a great fear of one particular thing may often create in people the habit of fear, so that everything which is not familiar and comfortable to them makes them afraid. And this thought was followed by the realisation that, because I no longer hold my life to be a lovely and precious thing, I am no longer afraid of anything at all, not even of death. And I smiled to myself for, unannounced, the King walked into my mind. And he looked at this new fearlessness of mine and sniffed and said: "Good." And then, as is his way, he turned and walked away, not deigning to comment any further.