by Rose Tremain
We were nearing St Paul 's. I did not know how long the praying of these Flagellant people might last once they went inside the church, and so, mindful of my errand of the ink, I decided to approach them straight away and ask them to spare me a few minutes before they began their prayers.
Coming up to the group from behind, I noticed how, on the shoulders of two of them, there was a rash of small wounds, as if the skin had been pricked and burst, and that some of these were infected and running with pus. And so I began my conversation with them by saying (quite loudly, so that they would hear me over their wailing): "Let me tell you good people that I am a physician and if ever the pain of your wounds becomes greater than you intend… I could give you a balm for it, to make it less…"
They turned and all stared at me and I saw that their faces were smeared with a white paste they had put on to make themselves resemble skeletons. I understood then that it was their intention to frighten people away and, indeed, they appeared somewhat affronted that I had had the temerity to approach them.
"Our pain," said one of them curtly, "is never greater than we intend, nor is it less, and as for you, the physicians, why do you not punish yourselves?"
I replied that, in my own case, fate had punished me so well that I felt relieved of all necessity to do so and I laughed at my own flippancy, hoping perhaps to elicit some answering smile from the Flagellants, but getting none. So I moved quickly to my question. "Look about you," one of them said in answer, "and you will see, not London, not a city with which you were once familiar; you will see a place come to chaos. The man who must live within chaos will go mad very soon. But we shall not. For we do not see it nor hear it nor smell it. All that we feel, all that we know is our own pain."
I thanked them and left them to go on their way. I walked very slowly towards Cloak Lane, where I hoped to purchase the ink for Frances Elizabeth, provided my ink-man had not died of the plague while I had been away. As I walked, I pondered the words and actions of the Flagellants and asked myself how best I should live in this "place come to chaos" in order to keep such sanity as remained to me. And I decided not to turn my face.away from the sufferings of the city but to try to measure them and define them. I would walk about. I would try to paint a picture of the plague (no, not on canvas!), a picture in my mind of where it was and how it traveled and all the things men and women had devised to make it leave them. And so I formulated a kind of plan with which to confront the slowness and sadness of time. And this making of a plan cheered me.
As Katharine grew heavier with her child, she became very heavy with sleep. And the mother, too, as if in sympathy with her daughter, would nod and doze over her letters in the room kept hot by the fire, and so I would creep out of the house, leaving the two of them to their dreaming, Katharine's white arm trailing down towards the floor, the mother's head fallen onto the table.
They did not ask or seem to care where I was going. They knew I would return, for Katharine had made me swear upon the green slippers never to practise or perfect any Leaving Step. And so I embarked on my "picture" of London, going sometimes north from Cheapside, but most often south towards the river and my old haunts, knowing that in these places every change would be visible to me and all of what I saw I would understand.
I did not visit Rosie. In her very street were two houses marked with the words "God Have Mercy On Us" and nesting near to the water at Southwark I saw a great quantity of rats. Yet you could not say that Rosie Pierpoint was in greater danger of the plague than any in Lambeth or Spitalfields or Shoreditch, because the disease did not seem to follow a traceable path along the ground, but rather to come out of the air, like seeds carried on the wind and falling here and there at random.
There was some noise, still, upon the river, but less than there once was, many of the fops and gallants and their women having fled into the countryside taking all their shrieking with them. I was told that some of the bargemen were starving, for lack of trade, and so made it my habit to have myself rowed some way on the water every afternoon. And for this act of charity, I was rewarded with the gossip of the river and heard how, to add to the melancholy of London, hundreds of poor seamen, sent away from their ships unpaid, had come in to the capital to beg money from the Navy office, and how these, because they had no shelter and no fire, were easy victims of the pestilence "but have no place to die in, Sir, but the street and so do make some disgusting deaths in the gutter."
"Why are they not paid?" I asked the bargemen and all of them gave me the same answer, which was that there was no money, the King "being very wasteful of what the Parliament gives him, as if he believes he has only to feed them false promises and they will shit gold on and on." And so I thought of what the King had said about his "honey-moon" being over. I had not believed him, but I saw now that he was right: he was loved less than before. Except by me.
It was only after several weeks of my wanderings about London that something of great importance became clear to me: I was not merely trying to understand the calamity of the city, I was trying to find for myself some role within it. So I began to ask the bargemen and the vendors of eel pies and the ink-man in Cloak Lane and everybody who would talk to me, "What can I, a trained physician, best do at this time?" But I got no satisfactory answers. Some people spat at me, as if the word "physician" had rendered me utterly repellent to them. Others advised me to go home and close my door and burn cleansing herbs over my fire and wait for time to pass. Others again began taking off their clothes and exhorting me to examine their bodies for spots and swellings. No one told me how I could become useful. And I think I would have continued aimlessly walking, noting, talking and watching if I had not one night woken up beside Katharine and heard in the room and in my mind a silence so profound that it is beyond words to describe because I cannot liken it to anything on the earth. I lay in it and looked at the dark and waited to understand what it was. And after a few minutes (minutes I could not hear passing but only sensed them pass) I knew that what had returned to me was the Silence of Pearce.
It is a thing that I find very difficult to endure, so lonely does it make me feel. I could not continue to lie motionless within it, so I rose and went down to the parlour and sat by the embers of the fire and waited for morning. But it was winter by this time, and I knew that this wait would be long, so to occupy the time I went upstairs again and fetched from under the bed (where I kept my few books and letters in one of the Whittlesea floursacks) the copy of William Harvey's De Generatione Animalium that had been given to me on my day of departure by Ambrose. It was Pearce's copy. It had been read so many times by him that the pages had become as thin and fragile as the petals of flowers, so frail in fact that one hardly dared to turn them. The black leather in which the book was bound was stained and torn, but it had been held for so long against Pearce's heart that it smelled faintly of him and, on putting it into my hands, Ambrose had said, "This was a part of John and is a replacement for the ladle."
I laid the book on my knee and opened it, turning the pages carefully, one by one. Certain of Harvey 's Latin sentences had been underlined by Pearce and on almost every page there were annotations in Pearce's minuscule writing. In the heart of the book, seemingly put there long ago and forgotten, I discovered two pressed primroses and laid into the pages with them was a piece of waxed paper upon which the Greek word meaning "prophylactic" had been written. Beneath this was a list – in English as far as I could decipher it – of ingredients, followed by short instructions as to how they should be mixed.
I took up this paper and brought it nearer to the light and I was able to see that underneath the list and the instructions Pearce had penned several of the ornate question marks with which all his medical books are peppered, the symbol having an absolutely precise meaning to him, denoting always "Absence of Proof". I was about to lay the thing back in the book, when I noted that one of the ingredients Pearce had written down was buttercup-root and my memory told me that, although this fleshy bu
lb is seldom used these days in any medical preparation, it is and always has been included in every preventative men have ever devised against the plague germ, Pastuerella Pestis. And so I concluded – rightly, as I was about to see – that what I held in my hands was Pearce's own prophylactic against the pestilence.
That Pearce should have written the thing on waxed paper was perverse of him, for ink cannot properly adhere to it and so the writing will soon enough become invisible. Luckily, he had employed a very sharp quill (he was always extremely fussy about his pens and liked them to be thin) and so, when I held the paper in front of the light, the words were magically illuminated, having been scratched into the wax.
And so my little role in London 's great tragedy was revealed to me: I would become a pedlar of Pearce's prophylactic. I would merchandise hope.
The money remaining to me at the time of my arrival with Katharine in London was almost gone. We ate food bought by Frances Elizabeth and kept ourselves warm with coal paid for by her. In return, I helped her with her letters, correcting her spelling mistakes and teaching her some elegant phrasing. She seemed content with this arrangement, but I was not. The notion that all that stood between me and destitution were letters of complaint and supplication (written for poor people who could not truly afford the price of the words) made me uneasy and afraid. And so I vowed to myself I would make a living by selling Pearce's remedy even if, to do so, I would have to have as my customers the relatives of the dead or dying and so find myself entering those houses marked with red crosses and with the words "God Have Mercy."
I paid five guineas to an old apothecary I had known during my time at Ludgate. For this sum, he made up a large quantity of the medicine (it tasted quite pleasant, being infused in Malaga Wine) and sold me a gross of bottles. Hanging on the door of his shop, I noticed one of the strange, bird-like headdresses worn by doctors going into plague houses and I asked him whether I might borrow this from him. "You may keep it, Sir," he said, "for that doctor comes here no more, nor goes anywhere, nor has breath."
I took it down and put it on. It is made of leather and covers the head and face and shoulders entirely. In it are set two eye-pieces made of glass and a long beak through which one is able to breathe with difficulty, it being stuffed with sachets of potpourri, put there to protect the wearer from the corrupted air. With the headdress goes a leather mantle (not unlike the tabards we used to wear at Whittlesea) and thick leather gloves that reach to the elbows. Once inside these garments, I knew that whoever I have now become – whether Robert or Merivel or neither of these or a composite of the two – I had rendered myself completely unrecognisable, even to those who knew me well. I did not even look like a man, but like a duck, and I thought how fitting this was, for in peddling Pearce's prophylactic, the efficacy of which had never been proven, I was about to become no better than a quacksalver.
This realisation, though it dismayed me for a while, did not prevent me, as I walked back to Cheapside wearing my duck garb, from feeling an attack of laughter coming on when I caught sight of myself in the glass of a low window. Not even in my fur tabard nor in my three-masted barque had I ever looked so completely and utterly ridiculous. I laughed for so long and so uncontrollably that all who passed me, I could see from my little eye-holes, shunned me as one gone suddenly mad in the street.
I will describe to you how the winter passed.
In December, I went into a plague house and found a man newly dead from the disease and kneeling by him his wife, holding his dead hand and weeping. I asked her what could I do for her and she told me that no one on earth could help her, for the sneezing and shivering that are the first signs of plague she knew would come upon her within a short time. I was about to turn and leave when I heard myself say (in a voice I did not recognise as mine, muffled as it was by the duck snout): "If no one on earth can help you, why not let one John Pearce, who is under the earth, save you from death?" I then held out to her a bottle of medicine. She looked at it for a moment, but then shook her head and returned to her weeping. Despite my very dire need for money, it was beyond me to ask this brave, grief-stricken woman for the one shilling and threepence I usually charge for the remedy, so I nodded to her and went out, leaving the bottle on her table. Four or five weeks later, this person, who had been seeking me for several days, found me and put her arms round my neck and kissed my beak. She had taken the medicine and the symptoms of plague had never come and so she believed that I had saved her.
From this time, when word of this success began to spread, my business prospered. People arrived at Frances Elizabeth's house asking for the medicine, thus relieving me of the need to go into plague houses in search of customers. Frances Elizabeth banked up her fires and burnt herbs on them and would not go near the strangers at her door. And more and more she and Katharine stayed upstairs in the bedroom, Katharine in the bed (where from time to time I made love to her without telling her that it was a love born of loneliness and need, and not of desire) and Frances Elizabeth in a rocking chair. And the two of them dreamed of the child to come and sewed bonnets for him and knitted blankets for his little crib. Katharine would hitch up her skirts and put her hands round her belly that was grown so large and heavy, by the coming of the new year, she looked like a woman come to full term. And the mother would lay her head gently in the middle of the abdomen, where the navel protruded like a rosebud, and feel the kicking of the baby's limbs. They seemed to long so ardently for the birth that this longing took all their time, so that the letter-writing was neglected and even I, downstairs in the parlour with my bottles, was forgotten so that I had the illusion sometimes that I was free once more, as I had been as a student, and not tied to Katharine or to anyone in the world and that I couild walk out into Cheapside and start my life all over again.
I did not give the unborn baby a great deal of attention. I thought of him as belonging only to Katharine and to her mother and not to me, as if I had made them a present of him. They wanted their present to be male. They wanted the son who could rise to prosperity in the Office of Patents and they named him Anthony, after the dead father. And one evening, an astrologer was summoned. This astrologer frowned when he learned that I was born under the sign of Aquarius and whispered some words to himself that I did not catch. He predicted that the child would be large and healthy and that, in its infancy, it would learn "a very pretty way with laughter." He set the probable date of birth as the twenty-fifth of February and went away richer by ten shillings, leaving Katharine and Frances Elizabeth disappointed that he had not told them more.
"Of what use is laughter?" sighed Frances Elizabeth. "It has never brought anyone to riches."
My birthday came again. I made no mention of it and there was no rejoicing. I was sullen all day, remembering the foolish Dégeulasse and the false hopes of his wife and daughters. And towards nightfall I thought of Celia, of her grace and sweetness and of her singing.
In the same week, I met, in the apothecary's shop, a man who had been alive for ninety-nine years. He told me that the plague was caused by the tiredness of the earth and that this was but the first stage in the ending of the world. I nevertheless persuaded him to buy a bottle of Pearce's preventative, it being his ardent wish not to die until he had reached the age of one hundred. Before paying for his bottle, however, he asked me what was in the mixture. I told him that it contained crushed rue, sage, and saffron with boiled buttercup-root, snake-root and salt and that these ingredients were infused with Malaga. He smiled and nodded and pronounced the medicine "clever" and left, and as he went out I saw the apothecary bow obsequiously to him.
"Who is that old man?" I asked.
"Do you not know?" said the apothecary. "Do you not recognise the fleshy nose and something in the set of the mouth?"
"No."
"Ah. Well, to me, there is a family likeness. He is the only surviving brother of William Harvey."
For reasons which I do not completely comprehend, I was so affected by this revel
ation that, instead of returning to Cheapside as I had intended, I walked to a nearby tavern, The Faithful Dray, and ordered myself a small flagon of wine.
I had not drunk any wine for such a great while that a very little of it rendered me categorically drunk and I sat in my corner, foolishly sipping, glad that I was not known in The Faithful Dray and so forced to enter into any conversation. I was about to order a second flagon (having now remembered that solitary drinking can be an oddly enjoyable pastime) when I heard someone say, very meekly and politely: "Good morning, Sir Robert."
I looked up. A man stood before me, so cadaverously thin that his face resembled a skeleton more nearly than the painted faces of the Flagellants. On top of this gaunt visage, he wore a blond wig, once fine but now matted and greasy and clogged with old powder. He had on his back a torn green coat and the hand he held out to me was encased in a green glove. I stared and blinked. And then the knowledge of who he was seeped into me. It was Finn.
If he had not had the courage to apologise to me for spying on me for the King, I would have got up and left him, without any regard for his sorrowful condition. But the first words he spoke were words of apology, and following on these came the story of what had happened to him. And both the apology and the tale were pitiful, the first being very stammering and clumsy and the second being full of suffering and humiliation.
You will remember that, while I was delirious with the measles, Celia left me and returned to the King, taking Finn and the finished portrait with her.
During this journey, Finn began to dream. He dreamed of the King's hand slapping him on the back and pressing a purse full of gold into his palm. He dreamed of all the commissions to come (ah, the beauty of that word "commission" for all the unknown artists and poets!) and all the imaginary arcadian landscapes in which he would place his famous sitters.