Restoration

by Rose Tremain

  I go in. The King is wearing a cream-coloured coat, but tied around his neck is a scarlet dinner napkin.

  Though I am sweating and my heartbeat is as noisy as any of the clocks, when I see the dinner napkin I smile. And so it is my smile that the King first sees when he lifts his eyes from the chicken leg he is devouring. And it is as if this smile of mine has some magical property to it, for the King lays down the chicken leg and stares at me and it is the stare of someone spellbound. He brings the napkin to his mouth and wipes his lips, but does not take his eyes from me.

  I bow very low, sweeping my new hat before me and when I come up from this obeisance, I see that the King has risen and moved out from the little table on which his supper has been set and is now walking towards me. At my back, I hear Chiffinch close the door.

  His Majesty stops, two feet from me. He reaches out a gloveless hand and puts it under my chin and tilts my face up, examining, it seems, every crease of it and every pore and even the shape of the skull beneath, so intently does he look at it. Then he shakes his head, as if in great sorrow at something, and yet over his face spreads a smile of such infinite kindness that I know on the instant that not one vestige of his anger with me remains and that, even if on the very morrow his mood will again turn against me, on this particular evening, the second of September 1666, he feels for me nothing but affection.

  I begin to speak. "Sir…" I stammer, "I am so glad to find you well…"

  "Hush, Merivel," he commands, "say nothing. For as you know, I see it all and understand it all. N'est-ce pas?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Exactly!"

  And then he laughs and brings my face to his and smacks a kiss upon my lips and orders me to sit down and eat.

  "It's a picnic," he says. "This is what I thought we would have: a picnic. We may eat as messily as we please, so go on, Robert, put a chicken on your plate and some eggs and there is a little cold salmon here and Chiffinch will return in a moment, as I have instructed, to pour you some white wine."

  I have no appetite. I tell the King I have been living very frugally and do not think that I can consume an entire hen.

  "Well," he says, "they are Surrey hens – very noisy while they lived, we are told, and very succulent in their flesh, so why do you not take up a little thigh and taste it and then, as you eat, your appetite will come back to you."

  I do as instructed and, indeed, I do find the taste of the chicken thigh as delicious as any meat I have ever eaten. Chiffinch returns and some cold, fruity wine is poured for me and I sip it slowly and feel its sweetness entering my blood and moving round me, making me feel calm and serene. The noise of the clamouring clocks, of which there are above two hundred, seems to diminish after a little while and it is as if the King, too, has noticed this diminution when he looks up from his food and says: "Time has waited for you, then, Merivel. As I believed it would."

  I only nod, not knowing what comment I am expected to make upon this statement. The King puts his jewelled hands into a finger bowl and rinses them and wipes them on his napkin and continues: "So that now you can teach me something instead of being my pupil: you can teach me about madness."

  I hear myself sigh. "Sir," I say, "there are so many kinds of madness and folly – of which love, perhaps, is both the sweetest and the most fearful – that I hardly know where to begin. However, one evening when I was in this Fenland place, which is a place quite outside the world that we inhabit here, I did find myself moved – by the scent of some flowers, it seemed to me! – to speak my thoughts about the Footsteps of Madness. These I could relate to you, if you wished, for it was a most strange thing to me that they were never heeded or commented upon, it appearing to me quite as if my listeners did not hear them, or could not hear them. And what I now wonder is whether no one in my life can ever hear them or understand them, except you."

  "Most probable. Relate them, then."

  And so I begin. I do not merely set out for the King my thesis upon the tangled pathways to madness and the great reluctance of the world to explore the reasons why each one is taken, but lay before him everything I have learnt about my own foolishness and everything I have done to cure myself of it. In short, I anatomise my heart. I reach inside myself and take hold of it and lay it before him. And all the while, he listens sometimes grave, sometimes smiling, as if – even though he "knows it all and understands it all" – the story that I tell him is new and full of extraordinary things that have never before been told to him, neither in the Clock Room nor in any other place in his Kingdom.

  Presently, it grows dark and Chiffinch brings lighted lamps and positions them round us.

  We eat grapes, spitting the pips into a silver spitoon.

  And the King comes at last to the subject of Celia, intertwined with which is the subject of his new love, Mrs Stewart, for whom, he whispers to me, "I have a most maddening folly, Merivel, so that were I with her upon a certain parapet, and supposed to be showing her the planet Jupiter, I would turn my back upon the entire starry universe just to cup her breasts in my hands."

  We burst out laughing and this laughter turns into the kind of giggling we used to indulge in on spring afternoons on the Whitehall croquet lawns. And so the whole question of Celia is accorded no seriousness at all, as if she were a toy we had once thrown about from one to the other and had long grown tired of.

  "I do declare," says the King at last, "that your idea of an annulment may be very useful, for then I shall be able to compensate Celia for the loss of my person at Kew by giving her a new husband: a young, handsome one this time! What do you think? Will this console her? What about Lord Greville d'Arblay's son, who is a very beautiful boy?"

  I reply that I cannot – knowing Celia the little that I do -make any guess about who or what may compensate her, but the King, suddenly serious, shakes his head and says quietly: "That is not so. For we both know that nothing in the world will make up for what she has lost."

  "Yes, we know it," I reply, "but it is Uncomfortable Knowledge."

  "Precisely. So where shall we consign it?"

  "I do not know, Sir."

  "Yes, you do."

  "Where, then?"

  "To oblivion, of course."

  And so we change the subject, and the great matter of my wife, the King's mistress, seems to pass out of my life entirely, so that my memory of Celia's face and of her singing voice fades and floats away into silence. And I feel a profound peace coming upon me, a peace such I cannot remember since I was a child and sat in the quiet of Amos Treefeller's room while my mother stroked my hair and told me it was the colour of sand.

  In this state of quiet and content, I decide that I will tell the King about my child. And I discover that the story of Margaret moves him very much and he, in turn, tells me what a great love he feels for the first of his bastard children, the Duke of Monmouth, and advises me not to neglect my child "but let her into your life, Merivel, and give generously of your self to her."

  I nod and promise that I will and then, because I am thinking about Margaret, I turn my head and look out of the open window eastwards along the river. And this is what I see. I see a great patch of orange light in the sky. I turn back to the King. "Sir," I say, "look there! If I am not mistaken a great part of the city is burning."

  No sooner had I said this than we heard voices in the chamber beyond us and then there was a knocking at the door. The King rose at once, his mood of kindness leaving him on the instant, so that his countenance appeared suddenly dark.

  Men began to crowd into the chamber. One I recognised as the clerk from the Navy Office, with whom I had once learned about the patience of a marble cutter. And it was he who now related to the King how an easterly wind had sprung up within the hour and was now blowing the fire "along a great pathway half a mile in width."

  Forgetting me entirely, the King went with this man and the others into his Drawing Room and I heard him command them to fetch out the Lord Mayor and give him orders that all the woode
n houses in the path of the fire be demolished, "this being the only way we can employ to halt it and put it out." The men went away in great haste and I heard the King shout to Chiffinch to go tell his brother, the Duke of York, what was happening and to send for a groom to saddle a fast horse.

  And then he went rushing out of the great doors to the Stone Gallery without any word to me or any backward look and I was left alone in his apartments and the only sounds were the chiming and pinging of two hundred clocks, each in their own time beginning to strike the hour.

  I remained where I was for several minutes, with my thoughts in a most tangled condition. Then I saw all at once what I had to do: I had to reach Margaret. I went down into the courtyard and asked for my horse. While waiting for her to be brought to me, a gust of wind blew off my hat and sent it spinning away into a flower bed. I retrieved it and held it in my hand. Then I mounted Danseuse and rode out of the gates and turned eastwards in the direction of the moneylender's house, which, as far as I had been able to determine from my sighting of the flames, lay in the very heart of the fire.

  The wind was indeed fierce and blew into my face and ruffled Danseuse's mane. As we got near to the City, I saw countless pieces of charred matter, lighter than air, being carried on the wind and falling softly like snow all around me. And then I could smell the burning and with every breath seemed to breathe the smell more deeply into me, so that it made me choke and gag and I spat on the cobblestones.

  The streets, now, were very packed with people, some moving with me into the stench and the smoke, carrying ladders or hauling handcarts, some in their nightgowns, just standing about in the street and staring, others giving way to fear and calling on God and the King to put out the flames.

  I turned northwards up St Anne's Alley. I gauged that westward of London Bridge everything along the river was burning, so that to get to the money-lender's house I would have to skirt right round the fire. But the smoke now began to creep down into the streets like a fog and having turned north, then east, then north again and then east again I found myself in a street I did not recognise and with all sense of direction gone from me.

  "Where am I? What street is this?" I asked about me, but no one seemed to hear me or pay me any attention, so all I could do was to press on, turning north, then east, then north again, trying to judge from the smell of the fire whether I was moving round it or still towards it and searching every narrow street for some name or landmark that would tell me where I was.

  I was about to make another northward turn when I heard straight ahead of me a great commotion of people and then I saw through the smoke that a single tongue of flame had swept down upon the roof of one of the houses causing a sudden mighty panic with people rushing from doorways into the street and looking up at the flame that was beginning to spread out along the eaves, then running back inside to try to save their children and their possessions before the fire came to them. For they had not expected it so soon. The great front of fire was still many streets away. But some burning thing -a sheet of music, a plumed hat, or I know not what – had come out of the sky and fallen on this one house, and all around me I imagined the fire travelling thus, carried on the wind, on pieces of silk, on love letters, on lace collars, swirling and leaping and floating down at random and immediately catching hold.

  The calamity come upon this street was such that I did not feel able to turn my back upon the people's plight. Had I been close to the money-lender's house, I might have done so, but I was still far, far from it and I now understood that my effort to reach Margaret was a futile thing. I had begun it too late. By now, my daughter would either have been saved or have perished in her wooden crib. I could not alter what had already happened. So I decided to dismount. I tied Danseuse to a post and took off my coat and went to give what help I could towards the saving of worldly goods and piling them onto carts and barrows, going into the rooms of strangers and taking up whatever I could carry: chairs and candlesticks and pictures and cushions and piles of bedding and chamber pots and ink-stands and toys.

  I was aware, for the first time, of the approaching heat of the fire and stood still for a moment in the street, wiping my brow and watching the roof of the house that was beginning to catch alight. My eye moved downwards, to try to see how and where and how fast the flames traveled, and it was then that I saw, above the door, a sign painted on iron and rattling backwards and forth in the wind: Arthur Goffe Esquire. Milliner and Haberdasher. But this was not all that I noticed. I saw, too, that the door of this house was closed and that it was the only one in the street from which people were not coming and going, hauling clothes and furniture.

  And so I threw down whatever I had been holding (and I do not know what it was or whether I broke it when I hurled it away) and ran towards the haberdasher's and beat upon the door and shouted, but heard no answering shout. One other man, then, left the saving of his own goods and saw with me what was happening, that in the very house where the fire had come in people were still sleeping. From his piled-up cart he fetched an axe and gave some blows to the door so mighty that it fell off its hinges. We stepped over it and went in, but found ourselves at once surrounded by pitch smoky blackness, so that, before we had reached the stairs, a foul choking and sickness, caused to us by the smoke, forced us to turn round and come out again into the street.

  "Who is in there?" I asked the man, who was spitting into the gutter, "how many people?"

  "Only her, Sir."

  "Who?"

  "Goffe's wife."

  "Just her?"

  "Yes. The haberdasher's gone to France to buy some special Frenchy thread, or some poxy thing."

  "We cannot let her die. We must go in again."

  "We can't get to her through that smoke. We shall die ourselves."

  "No. We must try again. If someone could bring cloths soaked in water to put round our faces…"

  "No, Sir. We cannot do it."

  "Bring cloths! Someone find water and a cloth!"

  "You'll die, Sir. You'll veritably perish."

  "And let us call and shout to her."

  "Will do no good. Stone deaf she is."

  "Deaf?"

  "Stone. As my prick to a Sunday sermon."

  So I saw her in my mind, then, lying in her silence, lying neat and straight in her bed as my mother had lain and downstairs in the workroom all the boxes of buttons and cards of lace and drawerfuls of braid waiting to burn…

  "Please!" I shouted. "Someone fetch me a wet rag or napkin!"

  I do not know who heeded my shout. But, in the next minute, a soaked cloth was put into my hands and without hesitating at all, I tied it round my face and went back into the house at a run and hurled myself at the stairs and then a muffled voice behind me said: "All right, Sir. I'm with you. Try not to breathe."

  We groped our way up the staircase. On the landing, a flickering light from the flames now beginning to touch the window revealed us to an open door and lying wedged between it and its frame with her arms outstretched was the body of the haberdasher's wife. We both saw it at the same moment. Without wasting precious breath upon speech, we crawled to it and each took hold of one of the woman's hands and tugged her towards the stairs. Then, my large companion nodded to me to let go the hand that I held, and he stood up and lifted up the haberdasher's wife and put her over his shoulder like a sack and I passed in front of him and guided him down the stairs and out into the street and he carried her thirty paces away from the burning house before he laid her down.

  Coughing and retching so violently that a gobful of chicken returned itself from my stomach to this London street, I knelt down by the woman and turned her over on her side until she began to splutter and to draw air into her lungs.

  "Alive, Sir, is she?" asked the man.

  I nodded. Then I looked down at the face of Mrs Goffe, wife of the milliner and haberdasher, and I saw that the features of it were very pinched and thin with the mouth turned downwards and mean and that she did not res
emble in any way either my mother or the woman in Finn's portrait. But it did not matter, for those were the faces that had driven me on.

  Two women came out to us. They wrapped Mrs Goffe in a blanket and laid her on a cart piled up with sacks and bedding.

  One of them brought water in a bowl and held a ladleful of it to my lips and I drank. The haberdasher's wife did not speak or even cry out as the flames engulfed her house; she only stared and began to chew upon the lace ribbons at her throat. I wondered if this terrible night would send her mad, so that her life had been saved only to be squandered away in a Bedlam.

  A great weariness now began to come upon me and I knew that I could not continue with my attempted circumnavigation of the fire. I would return to Cheapside and then begin it again the following day. I put on my coat and untied Danseuse from her post, where she was prancing and sweating with fear, and was about to mount and join the push of carts and people going westwards when one of the women came to me and thanked me for helping them and asked me for my name, "So that tomorrow I can include it in my list of them I pray for, Sir."

  "Well," I said, "my name is Merivel. I am a physician. If Mrs Goffe does not quickly get well, bring her to me." Then I handed the woman one of the little calling cards with R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. engraved upon it that I keep in a pouch on Danseuse's saddle. She took it and put it into the pocket of her apron. "I cannot read, Sir," she said, "but I will give the card to Mrs Goffe and she will remember you."

  Chapter Twenty-Five. Margaret Returned to My Mind

  Neither Frances Elizabeth nor Finn believed that the fire would travel as far as Cheapside. Between it and the main body of the flames a gap had been made, thirty or forty feet wide, by the hasty pulling down of houses, as instructed by the King, and it was thus that almost everyone living west of this gap imagined themselves to be safe.