by Rose Tremain
One Tuesday evening, I returned home to find a third plaque on the door. Elias Finn, it read, Portrait Painter to the Rising Man. When I went in, I found him drinking Alicante with Frances Elizabeth and he was dressed from neck to foot in new clothes. Apart from the shirt and the shoes, they were all green, even the stockings. "Ah," I said,. "I see you have been back to Sherwood Forest." But he only smiled thinly. The thin smile said: "The day for those old jokes has long gone, Merivel."
I can report to you that during this summer of 1666 I began to feel comfortable with my life, for the first time in a very great while, as if it and I were once again in step. When I am old, I shall remember it: The Time of the Three Plaques Upon the Door.
Then there was a June morning that came and after that morning almost all of this comfort that I felt went away.
It was a Sunday. I woke very early. I looked out of my window and saw that the sun was not yet up and I had (I really cannot say why) a sudden desire to see it come up over the river – something I had not witnessed for a great while.
I dressed and crept down the stairs and went out. The streets were silent. I heard the bell of St Alphage toll four o'clock. The air was cool, almost cold, and I began to think that, after all, there would be no visible sunrise. Yet I walked on. And when I came to the water, I sat on some little steps where tilt-boats and barges land their passengers and waited. Lying on the river was a white mist, so thick that I could not see the further bank.
The sky began to lighten and now I could see that there were no clouds in it at all and that, but for the mist, the sunrise would be as perfect as those I used to see from my Whitehall chamber.
I stared at the mist, or thought that I was staring at it and then I suddenly found that it was all around me and that I and the steps and the few boats moored by them were all become invisible within it. I looked up. I could no longer see the sky. Yet I did not walk back up the steps nor move any of my limbs. I knew that something was about to happen. It was as if time had stopped or held its breath.
I waited. I could feel my heartbeat very heavy in me. Once again, I sensed a lightening of the sky. I felt cold and put my arms around myself. Then, coming near to me, I could hear the splash of a pair of oars and heard the water at my feet begin to slap against the river wall and the steps.
The mist rose. As the sun came up over the housetops, it began to lift off the water and disperse.
And then I knew what I was about to see…
His back was towards me. He was skulling upriver and the sun, as it fell onto the river, caught at his jewelled sleeve and glinted there.
His skiff drew level with the steps. He was so close to me now that I could hear his breathing. I put a spread hand in front of my face so that he would not recognise me, but I need not have done so, for he did not look in my direction but only at his pathway on the water and at the sunlight making it gleam.
He went past me, but I did not take my eyes from him. Through my fingers I watched him until he went round the curve of the river and was out of sight.
Chapter Twenty-Four. The Haberdasher's Wife
As I have told you, my life just prior to this June morning had become an ordinary, industrious and quiet thing and I found myself at peace within it. I believe that if, during this time, I had been able to go fishing with Pearce instead of being visited by his Silence, I would have conducted myself like a true angler and not frightened away the trout.
From the moment, however, when I glimpsed the King on the river, my old foolish desire to see him and be returned to his favour began to possess me so completely that I could no longer feel at peace with anything at all. I became curt with my patients. At mealtimes, I was silent and morose. The joys of Tuesdays seemed less than they had been. And instead of going to the coffee house or the tavern to drink and talk, I would embark on solitary walks to the river and sit where I had sat that morning and scan the water for the sight of the little skull-boat, and write, in my mind, innumerable drafts of the letter telling the King of my usefulness.
As the summer progressed, the contents of this letter changed for I had thought up a new ploy (beyond the simple mentioning of my own diligence) to get the King's attention: I would write to suggest that because I was now a mere physician, with little money and no estate, His Majesty might come to feel that it was no longer fitting for me to continue to hold the titular role of Celia's husband. In which case, should he so decide, I would offer no obstacle to an annulment of the marriage, believing as I did that it was Celia's right to be married to a man more honourable than I could ever be…
I did not send this letter. I recomposed it fourteen or fifteen times in my head and one evening, while Finn played cards with Frances Elizabeth by the parlour fire, I sat down in the letter-room and wrote out a very elegantly phrased version of it, putting particular emphasis upon my return to medicine, my daily usage of the King's gift of the surgical instruments and my great repentance for my foul behaviour towards Celia, "a sweet, innocent woman who deserved much better of me than I gave and for whose happiness I say a daily prayer."
I folded the thing (after reading it so many times, I soon knew it all by heart) but did not seal it or put the King's name upon it. I went up to my room and took down Pearce's battered copy of De Generatione Animalium, put the letter inside it and returned it to the bookshelf.
I said to myself: You have written it now, Merivel, so let the writing of it quieten your mind, so that you can return to where you were and be happy, once again, with what you had. And after the writing of the letter, I tried to bring this about. But I did not really succeed. And the yearning that I had to see the King was as deep and immovable as the yearning of a lover.
Sometime towards the end of July, I went one evening into Finn's studio (for so the letter-room was now designated) and saw on his makeshift easel the portrait that he had painted of me.
"I suppose you are going to obliterate me by painting over me, is that it?" I asked Finn. "You put me over the top of a piece of pretend masonry and now you are about to white me out- the seven shillings notwithstanding."
"No," he said calmly. "Not at all. I am very fond of my portrait of you."
"What is my face doing on the easel, then?"
Finn came over to the easel and took down my portrait and lifted onto it a newly-finished picture of a woman, aged about fifty-five, dressed in a little lace bonnet and a black dress of puritan simplicity.
"See?" he said. "An identical pose to yours. The same attitude, the same concentration upon the hands, the same cold light on the face. The moment I saw her come in, I decided I would position her exactly as I positioned you. I had your portrait on the easel because I was trying to compare the two."
I looked at the woman, whose face had been finely rendered by Finn. It was a face of great gentleness, which reminded me very forcefully of my mother. And when I looked down at the hands, I saw that Finn had placed between finger and thumb a small feather, dyed red.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"I forget her name," he answered. "She is a haberdasher's wife."
I looked up sharply at Finn. He shrugged his green shoulders, as if to say "this is all I know". I then looked back at the portrait. The resemblance of this person to my mother seemed now so remarkable that I found my thoughts wandering away to a place where they had never before been: Supposing it was my mother? Supposing she had not died in the fire? Supposing the woman Latimer had tried to rescue had not been my mother, but the maid?
I knew that I was in a Place of Impossibilities. I left it as quickly as I could, but still fell to wondering in a more general yet fanciful way why the likeness was so profound and whether – in a world so tormented by fashion – there was some unlikely connection between haberdashery and gentleness of spirit, between the measuring of buckram and a soft heart.
That night, because she was in my mind all evening, I had a dream of my mother. She came and looked at my portrait. She put her hand up to the canvas and scratch
ed away at it until she had obliterated a bit of my forehead and revealed the white pigment underneath. Then she said: "On the surface, he is whole, but beneath the surface, he is filled with a most peculiar broken light." And then I woke and remembered the words of Wise Nell, the so-called witch in Bidnold village, how she had said that I would suffer "a long fall", but had not said what would come after it, whether there would be any end to it or any after, or whether I would go on and on falling deeper and further into confusion.
Some moments passed. Then I rose and lit a taper. And, stealthily and secretly – as if I imagined faces beyond the window looking in and observing me and sneering at my weakness – I took down Pearce's book, lifted out my letter to the King and read it through. Then I wrote the King's name upon it, melted some sealing wax with the taper flame and sealed it. "It cannot be helped," I whispered to the anonymous faces outside in the dark, "for I shall have no peace nor be cured of my yearning till I have some word from him…"
The next day, I delivered the letter to Whitehall and hurriedly came away.
While waiting for the King's reply – to take my mind out of the waiting – I went to the money-lender's house to visit Margaret.
She was asleep in her crib. Only her sleeping eyes and her flat nose were visible to me, but I could tell from her pink colour and her regular breaths that she was not ailing or sickly and the wet-nurse informed me that she sucked well and cried with great strength "and seems altogether very likely to live, Sir". And so I felt a sudden piercing joy in the realisation that this baby, whom I had brought into the world with my own hands, would grow to childhood and beyond childhood and that I would watch her growing and come to love her and take her on Sundays to the Vauxhall woods to look for badgers. And these thoughts were quite new and strange to me, so that it was difficult to believe that it was I who was thinking them.
I gave the wet-nurse some money.
"How long until she can be weaned?" I asked as I left the room.
"A good year, Sir," she said. "I do not let any of them go until then." She smiled and lightly tapped her breasts, as if showing me riches of which she was modestly proud. Behind her, two of her girls, both with pretty ringlets, smiled and giggled at me and then dropped each a little cheeky curtsey. I bowed to them, feeling my face flush.
As I trotted back to Cheapside on Danseuse, I thought what an unlooked-for pleasure it would be for me to have a pretty daughter. I imagined hiring for her a maid, who would wash her petticoats and curl her red hair into ringlets. But then I remembered that Margaret appeared to have my features (not the straight, thin nose and dark eyes of her mother) and so she would never be pretty. Indeed, she would probably be categorically ugly and so come to the only future that these times allow to ugly women – unless they be famously rich – which is a future of loneliness and low estate. So I began to consider how I might prevent this, by getting for her teachers of music and teachers of petit point and scholars who would guide her not only through the poetry of Dryden but through the work of all the great poets from the beginning of time, so that her accomplishments and her wisdom would get her a kind husband if her face did not.
For some while, as I rode, my thoughts turned upon Margaret's future and upon the great unfairness in society (once noted by me at an autopsy at Whittlesea) which allows men to prosper by many means and women by one means only. Until I turned into Cheapside, I felt most vexed, on behalf of my daughter, at the great unkindness and stupidity of this, but then the sight of my plaque upon the door drove everything from my mind but the expectation that, during my absence, an answer to my letter to the King had arrived. I dismounted and hurried in. There was nothing for me.
"Why do you ask?" said Frances Elizabeth. "Are you waiting for some news?"
"No," I replied, "it is only that my apothecary said he would send word when a curative I asked him to prepare for me was ready. He lacked some of the essential ingredients…"
I do not remember how many days passed before a letter arrived. What I remember is that time began to move very slowly once more and that I spent a great deal of it imagining myself grown old and the King grown old, and in all the years that passed no answer ever came, yet my expectation that it would did not diminish and so all that filled my life was a waiting that never ended.
I became very prone to error. A patient came to me with a pain in his gut that I diagnosed as a bleeding. I performed a "sympathetic phlebotomy" to stop the haemorrhage, but a day later he returned and showed me an iron nail brought up out of his stomach by means of a vomit, prescribed by a rival physician. My diagnosis had been so faulty as to put the man's life in danger. He made me take the nail in my hand and advised: "Put it where you can see it each day, so you are reminded of your error- that this mistake will drive out others."
I did as he advised, being very chastened by this incident of the nail (though how a man could come to swallow such a thing I could not fathom, unless his wife or his cook had wished him harm and concealed the object in a pie). But this did not prevent me from making other, smaller errors and from becoming very forgetful and absent-minded, so that, during this time, I won not a single game of Rummy, lost my purse in a tavern, stuck my eye with a quill pen, fell off Danseuse when she shied at a pigeon in the street, missed a Tuesday afternoon (thus incurring a fierce slap to my face from Rosie Pierpoint) and began to fall behind with this, my story – as if I understood at last that I was not truly the author of it, but that every twist and turn in it had been set down by the King.
And indeed, the next episode in it had his controlling hand upon it: he invited me to supper! He did not acknowledge my letter so many times perfected, nor make any reference to its contents. His note was short and curt. It read thus:
Merivel,
Why do you not sup with us upon Sunday Next? We shall expect you here at our chambers at nine o 'clock.
Charles R.
I received it on the morning of Monday, the twenty-seventh of August, towards ten o'clock. I was in the middle of cauterising a thigh wound when it was brought in to me and I burned my hand with the cauterising iron in my haste to break the familiar seal. And then, when I had read it, my next thought was the thought of a vain man: that I had no outfit fine enough to wear.
The tailor I went to was an old friend of my father's. He made the suit in five days out of affection for him, not for me. The material I chose was silk and the colour navy blue, braided with cream. It was neither fussy nor gaudy and I was most pleased with my choice.
I then went to a shoemaker and ordered a pair of shoes with heels modestly high and buckles of pewter, burnished to resemble silver. Thence to a milliner's in Crofter Lane. The hat I commanded was black with two soft blue plumes upon it.
And so to my wigmaker. He looked at me long. He had not seen me for many months. "Sir Robert," he said, "if I had not known it was you, I would not have known it was you," which puzzling sentence made me laugh and it was in my laughter that he recognised me, for then he said, "But now I see you. Now I see that the change in you is not entire."
He is very fond of sack. He likes to pour himself and his clients a good few thimblefuls of it while he measures their heads and displays his different styles and quality of wig for them to see. So we sat down together in his shop and he talked about the world ("for the world, though seeming big to some, is of course very little, is it not, Sir Robert, being really no larger than the shadow cast by the Palace of Whitehall?"), and who had found favour and who was out and what were the fashions of the summer, and I learned from him that the King had a new mistress called Mrs Stewart who outweighed all the others in beauty. "And they say," said the wigmaker, "that his old loves are gone from his mind to make room for this new one, even Lady Castlemaine herself."
"And my wife?"
"Ah, your wife, Sir Robert. There is a mystery! For she has not been seen anywhere for some time and the gossip goes 'either she is a-bed with child or else she is a-bed with Sir Fancy Newlove or else she is a-bed weepi
ng', but I can tell you that no one seem's to know for certain which kind or condition of bed she is in!"
It was almost suppertime when I left the wigmaker's shop, with the hot sun beginning to go down. I walked-home slowly, leading Danseuse by the bridle, and what came to my mind were some words of Sir Joshua Clemence, that to get the King's love he believed his daughter would sacrifice everything and everyone in the world, including her mother and father. I sighed as I remembered them and the voice of quiet resignation in which he had uttered them.
These moments I will not forget until I die:
I am not left to wait in the Stone Gallery. I am shown into the Royal apartments as soon as I announce myself to the guards.
I enter the familiar rooms. Though it is a stifling evening, a fire is burning in the grate of the first chamber.
William Chiffinch, the King's most trusted servant, bows to me and tells me that His Majesty, being very hungry on a whim, has begun his supper which he has ordered to be served in the small room where all the clocks are kept.
I follow Chiffinch and, as we near the room, which is no bigger than a closet, I hear once again the riotous ticking and jangling of time, by which the King is so fascinated and moved.