by Rose Tremain
After the dreams came the arrival. The portrait of Celia was unloaded from the coach and Finn carried it himself down the length of the Stone Gallery, believing that on this occasion the doors to the King's apartments would be straight away opened to admit him. But they were not. He waited in the Stone Gallery for two days, his mind so enchanted by his imminent preferment that he left his spot only once to eat a little meal of bread and sausage and to relieve himself. He slept with his head on the stone.
On the third day, he was summoned. The King looked down at the portrait (behind which Finn was humbly kneeling). His Majesty ordered lamps to be brought near to it. Then he leaned down from his great height and scratched at the pigment with his nail. A flake of burnt umber came off and adhered to his finger. He examined it and called for a silk handkerchief in which to deposit the flake. The handkerchief was brought to him. He flapped it at the picture. "Gaudy," he said, "and shallow. The antithesis of Lady Merivel. Take it away."
Finn saw the folly of protesting. He saw that to argue with the King would avail him nothing and lose for him the little money he would be given for the portrait, if he remained silent. And yet he protested. He came out from behind the picture and began to describe the pains he had taken with the thing, his care with the background and the fondness Celia had shown both for him and for the portrait. The King turned his back on him and walked away towards his bedchamber. Finn shouted after him that he owed him at least the seven livres promised in the contract and that no man would trust a King of England who did not keep his word. The King stopped in his tracks and called for his guards. Finn was arrested and sent to the Tower.
He languished in the Tower for seven months. He was not charged, he was forgotten. Celia's intercession eventually secured his release. He was ordered never to come to Whitehall again or to any place where the Monarch resided. He made his way to Norfolk, believing that Violet Bathurst would help him, but he found the Bathurst household in dereliction. Old Bathurst had died and been put into his mausoleum and Violet – whether in sadness for the loss of him or for the loss of me one cannot say – courted a daily oblivion in the fine Alicantes her late husband had hoarded in his cellar. She gave Finn fourteen shillings and the stuffed head of a marten cat and sent him away. Going out from her house, he was bitten by one of Bathurst 's hounds desperate for the taste of blood.
And so he returned to London, where he expected to die. He earned a poor living painting scenery at the Dukes Playhouse, but his anger against the King and against a world that would not value him was so great that it gnawed at his body as well as at his mind. It was, literally, wasting him.
All of this he told me at The Faithful Dray. We got so drunk together, we fell unconscious onto the floor and when we woke it was dark and the landlord was throwing a bucket of water over us. We went out into the street and vomited into the gutter. Then I took Finn home with me to Cheapside, and Katharine and Frances Elizabeth looked up from their sewing and stared at his hollowed, suffering face. I invited him to sit down at the table and after a while some knuckle stew with barley was served to us. As Finn spooned his to his mouth, I noticed tears coursing down his cheeks. They dribbled into his bowl of stew, making it more salty and watery than it already was.
Finn slept on a cot in the small dark room where Frances Elizabeth wrote her letters. He liked its smell of ink and paper and sealing wax and, after his first night in it, he asked me if he might stay a month or two ("only until the spring comes, Sir Robert…") at the low rent he could afford as a scenery painter.
Frances Elizabeth agreed. Gradually, her house was filling up with people, but she did not seem to mind. From being a very anxious-seeming and complaining person, she had become calm and enduring, and I surmise that she had found her years of solitude very difficult to bear. She never talked to me about Katharine's madness or about the day she had taken her to Whittlesea, or what had driven her to abandon her daughter. She never said that she believed Katharine was cured. It was as if she did not wish to remember the past – the death of her husband on the very steps of the Patents Office, the desertion of Katharine by the stone mason, the coming of sleeplessness and lunacy – but to savour the present and plan for the future, when her grandson would come into the world and grow to manhood and responsibility and let the women rest.
After the coming of Finn, however, when she heard me addressed as "Sir Robert", she began to write a letter to the Ecclesiastical Courts requesting that her daughter be allowed to divorce the stone mason "who has disappeared into the very aire" so that she could marry the father of her child. I sat down by Frances Elizabeth and gently took the quill from her hand. I intended to inform her that I, too, had a wife to whom the King himself had married me, but then I found I could not say these things to Katharine's mother, so I informed her instead that I did not believe there was any "e" on the end of "air" and that her writing was not as elegant in these letters as it sometimes was and that churchmen "being very fond of show and outward appearance" would be influenced in their decision by the beauty of the hand. So she tore up the letter and started it again, but I did not stay to watch her.
Two things brought me a little solace at this time: the first was the knowledge that Finn had suffered after his betrayal of me; the second was the discovery that, after all we had endured and done, we liked each other. I felt protective towards him. He believed there was some Divine purpose in our meeting in The Faithful Dray and that if he stayed with me his future would be revealed to him, as if he were the sitter in the portrait who one day comes sufficiently alive to turn and see the sylvan glade at his back and so discovers he can step from the dull foreground of the picture into a place of enchantment.
We did not talk very much about the Court, nor about the precarious nature of our two lives. We talked about Norfolk and our mutual fondness for its wide skies and its wet wind and the order and peace of its great parks. We talked about the Indian Nightingale: how, each in our own fashion, we remembered it as a significant thing. And we talked about Katharine and the peculiar ways in which, without meaning to, we sometimes bind ourselves to another person for all eternity.
With Finn in the house, I found that, when I could not sleep at night, I had only to imagine him downstairs on his cot for my loneliness to recede a little and I began to hope that, even after the child was born, he would still be there, lying a few feet from the ink-wells.
As the astrologer had predicted, the breaking of the waters of Katharine's womb occurred in the early morning of the twenty-fifth of February.
I dressed myself quickly and lit rushlights and positioned them round the bed. Frances Elizabeth put coal on the fires and went out to fetch the midwife, who lived in St Swithins Lane. Finn woke up and wandered about the house in his night-clothes, staring.
The midwife was a shy person, small, even dainty. She looked like a flower-seller. I said to Frances Elizabeth, "Perhaps you have fetched the wrong woman?" But I was shooed away. Women are the sole overseers of birth, as if the process of it must be kept forever secret from men.
Before I left the room, I asked Katharine whether she was afraid. She replied that the pain of the body had no terrors for her, only the pain of the mind. "Your leaving of me I fear," she said. "Nothing else."
I breakfasted with Finn upon some chocolate cake and then walked with him to the playhouse where, he admitted to me, he was at work upon some Venetian columns made of thin wood. "Well," I could not resist saying, "your day will be pleasant and easy, Finn, for you have had much practice with columns." I waited for his smile, but it did not come. Indeed, he seemed crestfallen.
I idled my way home, stopping to buy some opium grains from my apothecary, in case Katharine should need to be stilled to sleep after the baby was born and then calling in, as had become my morning habit, at The Faithful Dray for a glass or two of wine. By the time I returned to Cheapside it was past mid-day and as I walked in I expected to be informed that my son, Anthony, had come crying into the world.
From time to time I was given news of Katharine. The labour was slow. Her body, for all that it was large, was weak. It could not seem to help the child to be born. And slowly the afternoon came on and then the dusk and still Katharine laboured, submitting every ten minutes or thereabouts to pain so severe that I could hear her cries even in the parlour where I sat and waited, passing the time by playing arpeggios upon my oboe.
Finn returned and we and the women had a poor supper of the jam tarts eaten with a boiled custard. After this, I felt very sleepy, having been woken so early in the morning, and would have gone to bed except that I had no bed to go to. So I played a little Rummy with Finn, dozing over the cards, so that he won five games one after the other. He went off to his cot in the ink-room and I lay down on a settle and one of the women covered me with a woollen cloak and I slept that fiendish kind of half sleep that is filled with dreams and daydreams flowing in and out of each other.
It was morning, however, when I did wake at last. I pulled my limbs into a sitting position and listened. After a moment I heard Katharine's cry come, but it was a weak, piteous cry, as if she really did not have the strength to make any sound at all.
I crept up the stairs and knocked on the door of the bedroom. It was opened by the midwife and she let me come in. I went to the bed, beside which Frances Elizabeth was sitting, holding Katharine's hand in hers. At that moment, the pain came again to Katharine's body and I saw her arch her back and open her mouth to scream, but, as I had guessed, her exhaustion was so great that no scream came. I looked at her face, and then touched it gently. It was waxy and cold and her lips were white and cracked. "Katharine…" I whispered, but she could not speak or even smile.
"What is to be done?" I said to the midwife.
"The baby is large, Sir, and she cannot push it out of her."
"What is to be done, then?"
"We can do nothing. Only wait and pray."
"And then?"
"If she begins to slip away…"
"What?"
"I have seen the mother begin to slip away, and then there is only one way to save her."
"To cut into the womb?"
"Yes. To send for a surgeon."
I nodded. I looked at Frances Elizabeth, but she did not look at me. She knew perhaps as well as I that to save Katharine the surgeon would sacrifice the child, even cut it out from her body, limb by limb.
I left the room and went downstairs to the parlour. The fire was low, so I put a little coal on it. I knelt before it and did not move.
At half past ten, I heard two of the women go out and I knew that they were going to try to find a surgeon.
Then I got up and went into the kitchen and heated water and washed my hands. I knew precisely what I would have to do.
An hour later, the women returned. They did not bring a surgeon because at this time of plague no surgeon could be found.
Finn, who had no columns to paint that day, came and looked at me. His face was green.
"Merivel," he said (for this is how he addresses me now). "What are you going to do?"
"Finn," I said, "I am going to prevent a death."
He swallowed. Then he took up the woollen cloak under which I had slept and wrapped it round himself, and stood huddled inside it, as if it were old Bathurst's cowshed – a place of retreat.
Then I began to give my orders. I told the midwife to wash Katharine's abdomen and to put clean linen under her. I sent two of the women to fetch pledgets and bandages; to another I gave the opium grains and told her to pound them and mix them with water.
Meanwhile, I fetched my scalpel and my suturing needle and cleaned them. In my heart, I felt not fear, as I should have done, but a welling of excitement that seemed no less intense than that which I had felt in the coal hole of my parents' house when I dissected the body of a starling.
I went up to the room. Katharine's eyes were glazed and staring, her breathing shallow like the breathing of the little dogs I had once tended.
There were six women in the room. When a little of the opium mixture had been dribbled into Katharine's mouth, I positioned them like sentinels – two to hold down her upper body, two to hold her legs and two (including the midwife, for whose small careful fingers I was about to be grateful) to help me.
The day was bright. Light shone into the room and glimmered on my hands on the scalpel blade.
I said a prayer, not to God, but to my mother and to Pearce. Help me now, I asked.
Then I cut.
I cut into the skin. Beads of blood appeared, like the strand of a necklace laid on the belly from the navel to the pubic hair.
I cut into the tissue and the bright blood flowed over the belly. Hands holding the pledgets reached out and the lint began to soak it up.
I cut into the peritoneum and so into the abdomen. In a calm voice, I instructed the midwife and my other helper to put their hands into the two sides of the wound and hold it open. This they did and I laid down the scalpel and took more lint from them to staunch the bleeding. And as the bleeding lessened, I saw revealed to me the coil of Katharine's bowel and the sack of her bladder and the wall of the womb itself.
I wiped my hand on some linen. I did not look at Katharine's face nor allow myself to imagine her suffering. All of my attention was concentrated in my hands.
I cleaned the scalpel, wiping blood off the exhortation "Do Not Sleep." I positioned the blade above the lower third of the womb and I cut transversely across it.
Again, blood flowed. Onto my hands. Onto the folds of the bowel. I laid the scalpel aside. I put pledgets on and saw them fill with blood. I removed them and pressed clean ones on. I felt a single droplet of sweat slide down my forehead and sting my eye. I could hear my own heart beating and, for one tiny vessel of time, no longer than a single second perhaps, I lost all consciousness of where I was.
But I did not faint or falter. I parted the lips of the incision I had made in the stretched wall of the womb and felt pressing against my fingers the head of the baby.
"Help me now," I said to the midwife, "for my hands are too large to go in. I will hold open the abdominal incision. Put your right hand under the head like a shoe-horn and, not wrenchingly but gently, lever it out."
So I came to Katharine's side and the young midwife I had likened to a flower-seller reached into Katharine's womb and took out the child, first easing out the head, as I had instructed, then putting her small hands under its armpits, and pulling forth the little slippery body.
It was alive.
But it was not Anthony. It was a girl.
Chapter Twenty-Three. A Light on the River
In Genesis, we are told that before Adam's flesh was opened and the rib taken out to be made in Eve, "the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam". I have always considered that this was most thoughtful of Him, for it spared Adam a great amount of pain and, as a physician, I have many times wished that I could bring such oblivion upon my patients before hurting them. Fabricius once talked about a certain Arnold of Villanova, living in the fourteenth century, who had discovered the secret of a sleep that would not be broken by pain, but no record was ever made of the ingredients of the secret and so it has never been whispered to us down the ages. My wish, then, has not been granted, and when I took up my scalpel to make the incision in Katharine's belly, I did not pray for any oblivion for her, knowing it to be an impossible thing; I prayed only for myself – for my own skill.
When I cut into the abdomen, however, she passed into a sudden and profoun
d unconsciousness. It was not caused by the little dribble of opium we had put into her mouth, for opium works slowly and stealthily. I decided at first that the great agony given to her by the wound had made her faint. But several hours passed and she did not come out of her coma. Her breathing became stertorous, like the breathing of Pearce in his last illness. And so I did not know what this sleep could be, unless it was the sleep of coming death.
I could not sew up the slit in the womb, the wall of it being stretched so thin that the sutures would tear it, so I left it to heal and close of itself in its own time. The abdominal incision I stitched together and sprinkled with a little Pulv. Galeni and had the women put lint on it and bandages that encircled the buttocks to bind it. All this I did without Katharine being aware of what was done to her body or even that her child had been brought out of it living like Julius Caesar and like the good Macduff of Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, the story of which had been told to me by Amos Treefeller in his back room smelling of polished wooden hat-stands.
The baby was taken away by the midwife and the other women to be washed and examined and then bound in swaddling. They told me that the infant's head was covered with a soft down "of a reddish colour" and that it was a well-formed child "with a good and lusty cry." And they held it up for me to see its face and I saw that it had a little flat nose like my own. Then they asked me: "What shall we call the baby? What name had you in mind?" And I replied that I had no name in mind, having been told that my child would be a boy and christened Anthony.
The women looked at me reproachfully and snatched the child from my sight. And when they had gone, I sat down and rubbed my eyes and for the first time told myself that I was the father of a little girl, breathing and alive. I put my hands together in the kind of prayer steeple Ambrose used to make and asked for kindness from God and the world towards my girl. "Let her have playthings, as many as I can afford," I added, "but let her not be a plaything for any man." And as soon as I had whispered these thoughts, I decided upon the name Margaret, which was my mother's name and thus to me a serious and precious word. So I got up and went to the women and told them that the baby would be christened Margaret after my mother and after Margaret Fell. They nodded their approval and from that moment, when the child cried and they comforted it, I heard them saying, "Hush, Margaret, all is well."