by Rose Tremain
Yet it was not true. After some hours, during which Katharine did not stir nor move any of her limbs, the midwife uncovered one of her breasts and pinched the nipple, trying to make the milk come, but despite the great heaviness of her breasts there did not seem to be any proper milk, only a little weeping from the teat, which, when the midwife touched it and then licked her finger, had a bitter taste like bile.
"Put the baby to the nipple nevertheless," said Frances Elizabeth, who stood by her daughter and combed her black hair over the soft pillow, "and it will make the milk come."
So Margaret was laid on Katharine's stomach, above the bandaged wound, and her little mouth tickled until it opened and the teat put into it. She began to suck but quickly spat out the teat and screamed and would not, no matter how the midwife tried to persuade her, stay on the breast and suckle. She was put back into the crib and covered with the blankets and quilts made for Anthony. I ordered that a wet-nurse be found.
I sat by Katharine. I picked up her hand, which felt hot with a fever, and held it in mine. I looked at her face – not as the face of a poor woman towards whom I felt utter indifference but as the face of the mother of my child. I wanted to love the face and feel tenderness towards it, but I could not, so I got up and went downstairs, being afraid that Frances Elizabeth would look at me and read my thoughts and my feelings.
I found Finn sitting by the fire in his undergarments, sewing patches onto his Lincoln green. His raggedness has become very dire and, had I the money, I would buy him a new suit of clothes. Nevertheless, the sight of him mending his things made me smile and I could not resist saying to him: "Ah Finn, a new profession, I see: tailor."
He had the wit to laugh. Then he said: "I do not know what to do, Merivel, about how poor I am."
"Well," I said, "why do you not paint my portrait?"
"What?"
"You heard me, Finn. But do not paint me as a rich man, dressed up in satin or with a sea battle going on behind my head; paint me as I am, in my old wig and in my shirtsleeves and in this simple room."
"And how is that to gain me any money?"
"I will pay you what I can. But then, if the picture is good, you will take it and show it round in the coffee houses and in this way get more commissions, not from the fops but from ordinary citizens – clerks at the Navy Office, silversmiths, lawyers, haberdashers and so forth. They will not pay seven livres for a picture, but they will pay something because there is no man alive who does not feel his status improved by a portrait of himself upon the wall."
I presented this suggestion to Finn as if I had been giving the idea very close thought for some time, when, in reality, it had only that second entered my mind. Having offered it, however, I saw that there might be something in it and so did Finn, for he put down his sewing and looked at me and his look was bright and full of hope.
On the evening of that day, Margaret was lifted out of her crib by the midwife and wrapped in shawls and blankets and taken to the house of the wet-nurse. I accompanied them, because I wanted to see the woman, to make sure she was not diseased nor her house dirty.
It was the house of a money-lender. It was tall and narrow and overhung the river. In one room of it the broker did his transactions and wrote out his accounts; the rest of it seemed filled with children – eight or nine of them – from all the ages of two to twelve, and when the wet-nurse greeted us she held in her arms a tenth child, a fat baby of six months or so.
She showed us into a parlour. I saw a good fire burning and smelt the familiar smell of herbs being burnt upon it to keep away the plague germs. She laid her own baby on a little rug before the fire and took Margaret into her arms. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-five with a gentle smile that reminded me of Eleanor and Hannah. She put a finger to Margaret's mouth and she began at once to suck on it. Then one of her children, a little boy dressed poorly but with a healthy colour in his cheeks, came into the room and stood by his mother and peered at Margaret's round face.
"She looks like a flat little button," he said.
"Hush," said the wet-nurse. "See her eyes? Colour of cornflowers."
We did not stay long, for the impression I formed of the woman was good. She told me that her milk was plentiful "and not sour, for I shall never eat any soft fruit nor drink cider" and that she was "a very wakeful person, attentive to all my little ones." When I gave her some money, I wondered if she would be allowed to keep it for herself or whether she would have to surrender it to her husband, who would lend it out at interest.
We walked back along the wharves. "It is strange," I said to the midwife as I looked at the water, "we did not really have any winter and now here is the spring already."
That night, I lay on the floor beside Katharine's bed. The midwife had been called away and the other women had gone back to their families, so the household returned to what it had been before the birth, except that Katharine's voice was no longer heard within it; only her snoring and her sighs.
When I dressed her wound in the early hours of the morning, I saw that blood was seeping constantly from it and that blood flowed very freely out of her vagina into the linen under her, and I did not know how this haemorrhaging could be stopped or why the wound was not beginning to clot and knit together. Then I remembered that at St Thomas 's we once performed a cephalic phlebotomy on a man bleeding from his anus and that this making of an external cut staunched the flow of blood inside the bowel.
So I took up her arm. It was cold, with a damp sheen to the skin. I found the vein and cut and let a little blood drip into a basin. And at this moment, Katharine opened her eyes. She stared at me, into my face and into my mind. The stare did not falter. It remained. It saw all that I had done and all that I had tried to feel and could not. I turned away from it, looking round at the empty crib. I thought that when I looked again the stare would have softened and become forgiving. But it had not.
So I put my hand out. That is all I did. I did not whisper any last blessing or say any prayer or utter any words at all. I only put out my hand and closed the staring eyes.
Frances Elizabeth wept for the death of her only child and Finn, who has the heart of a gazelle, wept for Frances Elizabeth, remembering her kindness in saving him from destitution with a knuckle stew and a canvas cot in the letter-room. But I did not weep at all.
I walked out of the house and went and sat in a coffee house and drank bowl after bowl of sweet coffee. And the talk and smoke and laughter of the place, though I was not a part of them, I loved exceedingly for they had the smell of life returning.
Then I had a great mind to shit and found a place and did it, and even this I found pleasurable and after it felt very cleansed, as if I had been given a new body.
I passed all the day walking about the city considering what I might do with the next bit of my life and by the time the dusk started to gather around me, I had decided what it was.
Then I returned to Cheapside. On my way I bought some white violets from a flower-seller. I bought them for Katharine – to put into her hands or to lay upon her wound – but then both the flowers and the gesture of putting them on the body seemed to me to be dishonest things, and so I threw them into the gutter.
Katharine was put into the ground in the churchyard of St Alphage.
I wrote to the Keepers of Whittlesea and in this letter I said: "She is at rest now, in the sleep of eternity," but I repented afterwards for putting down so sentimental a thing.
I made a vow. I vowed I would never again be moved by pity. For I see now that in my "helping" of Katharine I was not acting unselfishly (as I believed) but only trying to do some good to my own little soul.
The night of the burial, two seamen from the Royal James knocked at the door. They asked Frances Elizabeth to write on their behalf to the Duke of York, to beg that the wages owed to them be paid. I told them she could not do it "having today buried her daughter", but that I would write it for them. They thanked me and asked me to tell the Duke all their mis
eries and hunger, but to "set them down in no more than six lines, Sir, for this is all we can pay for."
I went to the letter-room to begin on the thing and there I found Finn stretching onto some wooden slats a piece of canvas he had stolen from the Playhouse. It had been painted upon already. It appeared to be a small part of a building -a castle or a tower.
"What is this, Robin?" I said. "The foundation stone of your new mansion?"
"Yes, it is," he replied. "For I am going to paint your portrait over it and your portrait – as you have suggested – is going to begin for me a new life."
When he had finished stretching the canvas, he propped it up against some books on the very table where I worked on my letter for the seamen, thus casting an irritating square shadow onto my paper. I said nothing. I watched him take up a brush and palette and put onto it some white pigment. He then began to cover the entire canvas with this white, obliterating the piece of castle. And seeing all this white go on as a prelude to the painting of my face, I remembered a thing to which I had given no thought for a long while and that was the white "waft of death" that Katharine had seen in me in the time of her madness. It sent into my belly a little worm of unease, so I put it at once from my mind and concentrated upon my letter. I wrote it in the stylish, neat hand with which I used to write my epistles to the King. I said, "If England does not cherish and care for those who have fought in her wars, what is to become of them and what is to become of England? Surely, Sir, they will both sicken?"
Then, being in the mood for letter-writing, I took up the quill again and wrote to Will Gates, telling him all that had happened to me and requesting that one of the grooms ride my horse to London. And when I thought about Danseuse, I marvelled at the notion that so swift and fine a creature could still belong to me.
Some weeks passed, during which Finn's portrait of me began to emerge (like a face coming out of a Norfolk mist) from the white canvas. In it, I appear somewhat grave – as if I were a reeve or a librarian – yet my eyes are filled with light. Finn wishes to title the picture A Physician, thus rendering me anonymous, but I do not mind. The only nuisance was that I had to sit still for several hours at a time with my hand uncomfortably poised in the act of taking up the scalpel from my box of surgical instruments.
I watched the picture carefully for any signs of fiction and untruth. But I am glad to say there were none. Behind my head is no imagined Utopia, but some plain, dark panelling. I congratulated Finn. I told him this was the best work he had ever done and saw a very foolish grin break out over his face.
In these weeks of the portrait, we offered to leave the house in Cheapside, and indeed I was anxious to leave it for I did not like sleeping in the bed where Katharine had died. But Frances Elizabeth wept and begged us to remain, so I replied that I would stay until summer. Finn, I suspected, would remain longer than that, so fond did he seem to be of the room where he slept and where he now worked upon the picture, thus forcing Frances Elizabeth to do her letter-writing in the parlour. But she never complained about this dispossession. She was ready to make any sacrifice to keep at bay her widow's loneliness.
In late spring the portrait was finished and in the same week Danseuse was returned to me.
I was much moved by both things.
I was not flattering Poor Robin when I told him the picture was very fine. It was no gaudy piece of work: it was sober and dark. Yet the face of A Physician, lit by a cold watery light, reveals the warring complexities within him – his love of his vocation and his fear of what it reveals to him.
I gave Finn seven shillings for it, one tenth of what he might have got from a rich man, but almost all the money that remained to me after I had paid the groom for his journey with Danseuse and found stabling and oats for her.
She was in excellent condition. Her rump gleamed. Her saddle and bridle had been soaped and polished and in the saddle bag was a letter from Will, which ran as follows:
Good Sir Robert,
It was a mighty joy to me to get a word from you and know you are in London, where God keep you safe from the Plague.
I am sending a Boy with your mare, she has been galloped a little every day and fed good hay so do not fear we have put her out of our mind.
I can report this same bad Pestilence is come to Norwich where most terrible for all. Except, on getting a smell of this news, the Viscomte de Confolens has gone back to France and is no more seen here, which is not terrible but mighty excellent, for I and M. Cattlebury we did Detest and Loathe him. Pray he will not return.
We are glad your life goeth on and we send you our blessings for your little girl Margaret which is a name well loved in my family and in all Norfolk I do think as well.
Your servant, Wm. Gates
Having read Will's letter which – as his letters always do -made me remember him very fondly and brought to my mind my easeful life at Bidnold of which he had been a part, I was impatient, suddenly, to get up on my horse and be reminded of what it was to ride about the streets, instead of tramping through the mud and dirt of them on foot.
I rode first to Shoe Lane, to the little dark shop of an engraver that I used to pass when I had my rooms in Ludgate. I went in there and ordered to be made a small brass plaque with the words R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. chased into it.
I then remounted and turned Danseuse round and put her to a pleasant trot. And, trotting all the way, we went along Blackfriars and crossed the river at Southwark Bridge and so came in a very short time to the house of Rosie Pierpoint.
I will not deny that what followed was very pleasant. If I had once believed that my desire for Rosie had been snuffed out by the loss of other, more precious, things, I now saw that, after all that had passed, its vital flame still had a little breath.
While I have become thin on Quaker porridge and widow's stews, Rosie has prospered and grown fat and the sweet dimples above her bottom are deep and when she smiles there is a fold of flesh under her chin. And these things delight me.
She told me that, since the plague came to London, there has been "a craze for washing and for the boiling of pillowcases in lavender water" and that she could not remember a time when her business had "blossomed out more."
No longer did she eat meals of fish and bread: now, she was able to buy chickens and pies from the cookhouses and cream from the dairies. She worked hard but, as a reward, she spoiled herself. She believed that her fires and her cauldrons of perfumed water and the good food she ate kept her safe from the plague "for it is the poor and the cold who die from it, Sir Robert, and not the likes of me."
We lay in her bed all afternoon and I told her the decision I had come to, which was to set up in London as a doctor and surgeon once again and to make my living in this way and no other. And she sat up, leaning on her elbow, stroking the moths on my stomach with her fat little hand and said, "Everything, then, will be just as it once was, before you went to Whitehall," and I was in no mood to contradict her, so I nodded and replied, "Yes. As if the time between had not existed."
I left her towards evening. As she put a wet farewell kiss upon my mouth, she told me that the King had returned to London. "But take care," she said smiling, "that you do not go near him, for you do not want your life to go round in a circle!"
I did not go near him. Of course I did not.
I borrowed two shillings and ninepence from Frances Elizabeth to pay for my brass plaque and I nailed it to her door, under her own sign, Letters Written.
As the summer came on, the plague appeared to be dying down and, because people believed that it was leaving them, they had no cause any more to despise the physicians. And so the sick and the hurt of Cheapside and its neighbourhood began to come to me – some sent by my old apothecary friend, some because they had seen my sign, and some cast upon my doorstep by the tide of rumour and gossip that washes through the coffee houses and the taverns.
Most often, I would be fetched by some relative or neighbour of the sufferers and so would t
reat them in their homes; sometimes, they brought their wounds or their pain to me and there was no other place to receive them and tend them than the parlour, so that in time it became an operating room like those we had had at Whittlesea and Frances Elizabeth, chased out of her letter-room by Finn, was now deprived of her parlour by me. Even now, she did not complain. She bought a little escritoire and put it in her bedroom and wrote her letters there, her hand and her phrasing becoming more and more elegant and assured as time passed and her fear of solitude diminished.
On Tuesday afternoons – as was my old habit – I would visit Rosie and we both grew very comfortable with this arrangement, neither of us wanting more from the other than these few hours could give. I no longer gave her money, but I would take her gifts of food: a dressed capon, a jar of mincemeat, a pat of butter. And sometimes we would eat a little supper together, sitting at her table by an open window and listening to the sounds of the water.
"You can hear the noisiness of it," she said one evening, "coming back."
It was coming back everywhere. It was as if London had decided to chase away death with laughter. In the coffee houses, Finn found a great clamouring of people ready to pay twenty or thirty shillings for a portrait, because they believed in the future again and could even foresee a time when these same portraits would hang in the houses of their grandchildren on grander walls than any they would ever live to own. And so they came, one after the other – merchants, barristers, schoolmasters, drapers, cabinet-makers, clerks – and sat where I had sat, near the empty ink-wells of the letter-room, and Finn gave them their immortality on stolen canvas. I watched them go out with the finished pictures and no matter how coarse were their features I saw them softened and made glad by this image of themselves that they held in their hands. The next stage was that they would send their wives, to have a twin portrait hanging the other side of the fire. And when Finn saw that this was happening, he fell into his old ways of wanting more than he had and so the price of the pictures went up to thirty-five shillings and then to forty and then to forty-five.