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  "What hour is it?"

  "I have no idea. I could, if you wish, consult the handsome timepiece given to me by – "

  "I believe my guest will arrive at mid-day."

  "Your guest? What guest, pray?"

  "Am I not allowed guests, Merivel?"

  "Naturally. I only wished to enquire – "

  "He is my music teacher. At my father's request, he has agreed to make the journey from London."

  "Ah."

  "Thus my days will not be as tedious as they were. I will have the pleasure of sitting for a fine artist and the pleasure of singing for an inspiring Musikmeister."

  "I'm sorry you have found the days 'tedious'."

  "It's not your fault, Merivel. I don't belong in such a life."

  "Happily," interrupted Finn, "you will soon be back at Court."

  "Yes," said Celia. "Once the portrait is done, you will have to let me go, Merivel. Though it has been difficult for me to practise my singing without an accompanist, that is now remedied, thanks to my father. I am thus doing as you suggested, trying to come to a clearer understanding of my destiny through song. Thus, you must report that I have done all that the King requested."

  "We shall see, Celia…"

  "No. We shall not see. If you will not make a good report of me to the King, I shall return to London nevertheless. For the portrait changes all."

  "How does it change all?"

  "You are obtuse, Merivel. Would the King commission a portrait of a woman he did not intend to see again?"

  "Very possibly," I replied. "In remembrance of former times, now departed – as a mere souvenir."

  Celia shook her head and glared at me coldly.

  "No," she said, "I know the King. He would not do this."

  I was on the very verge of revealing to Celia what I had seen that strange night upon the river, the lights in her house, the revellers at the window. But I hesitated. Not only was I unwilling to hurt Celia so cruelly, but the night in question had taken on the colours and insubstantial quality of a dream in my mind, so that I could not now swear I had seen what I thought I had seen or merely dreamed it because I wanted it to be so. Likewise, on that early morning of the death of the Indian Nightingale, had Celia clung to me as she cried? Had she let me stroke her hair? Since then, she had been colder with me than before and I now foresaw a time when, surrounded by an entourage of Finn and the music master, she would forget me entirely.

  I sighed and left the Studio, aware as I did so that there had been a strange sweetish smell in the room, most cloying and odious, which I knew must come from the powder adhering to Finn's wig.

  Tired to my marrow, I feel. So tired, I feel the pain of exhaustion in my anus. But here I am at supper, attired in blue with a yellow bow on my lace collar, eating venison with Celia and her Musikmeister, whose name is Herr Hummel. His family is from Hanover and he dresses like a Puritan and complains of chilblains on his feet. "Musikmeister Hummel is a person of great refinement," Celia has informed me, but his refinement appears least in evidence at the table for a very slight paralysis of the lower lip has occasioned a tendency to dribble. I try to guess the man's age and deem it to be about fifty. His English is excellent, heavily accented but quite without fault. I find his presence moderately agreeable.

  We are drinking a good claret. The pains of exhaustion fade somewhat. I am conversing with Herr Hummel on the subject of madrigal harmonies (about which I know very little but he a great deal, thus sparing me the effort of talking) when I suddenly remember my dream of the King on my roof and how, when asked how I was ever to master the art of oboe playing, he had advised me to "learn in secret". I interrupt Musikmeister Hummel to propose a toast to the King. We raise our glasses and I drink with great relish, aware that, though the arrival of Finn is most irritating to me, the arrival of Herr Hummel may prove most fortunate. For around his temporary habitation in my house I am now constructing a plan.

  I glance at Celia. Warmed by the wine, she is smiling, but not at me, of course. I lower my gaze and for a few brief seconds allow myself to watch the rise and fall of her breasts.

  Chapter Eleven. The Unknown Known

  My birthday is approaching. I was born under the constellation of Aquarius, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, the sign of the water-butler, that humble but indispensable slave who fetches from wells and rivers the element so vital to the structure of human tissue. I imagine this Aquarius as an old, stooped man, his spine warped by the weight of a wooden yoke from which hang a pair of brimming pails. On he staggers, day after day, year after year, with his precious burden, but his strength is waning, he totters and stumbles and, as he moves through time, more and more water is spilled, thereby engendering in the bellies of the ancient gods an irritation stronger even than thirst. They long to give the slave's skinny buttocks a vengeful kick. They would, if they dared, send a rod of lightning to pierce his ragged neck. And yet they must not. Hopeless as he is, they cannot do without him.

  Despite my birth date, the twenty-seventh of January, I have never, I think, held any notion of my own indispensability. As a child my mother looked at me lovingly and would no doubt have wept a while had I been eaten by a badger in the woods of Vauxhall. But this is all. She would not have died without my hand to hold. As a student of medicine, I prayed that my knowledge and skills might one day lie between a man and his death, but I cannot recall now that they ever did. In my brief delirious sojourn at Whitehall, I verily believed I was becoming indispensable to the King, but time has shown me that here I deceived myself utterly. More recently I have longed for Celia to esteem and value me and hold my life to be of prime importance, but much of the time she behaves towards me as if I was not there. Since the arrival of Finn with his commission for the portrait, she no longer regards me as her overseer. With her picture done, the King will, as she suspects, call her back and that will be the end of it. The duet of my imaginings will never be played. And yet I go on trying to please her. Her voice still moves me more than I can express. When seated near her, before the fire in the Withdrawing Room or at the supper table, I long to reach out and touch her. When she returns to Kew, I know that I shall mourn her loss. I may even write foolish letters to her, saying what I do not dare to say to her face. For I am a paradoxical thing: a dispensable Aquarius. I lie foolishly sprawled in the gutter of the via della vita. My pails, brimming not with water but with my own appetites and vain pleas, have toppled me; I have not been kicked.

  I am to become thirty-eight years old. I shall note the arrival, duration and waning of this day in the following manner. I shall sleep late, hoping to dream of tennis (a sport which used to make me strangely happy). I shall pass some hours of the morning with Musikmeister Hummel, pursuing my secret plan, the unfortunate venue of which appears to be the summer-house. In the afternoon, I shall paint Russians. In the evening I shall devise some merriment, pay some musicians, invite Mister James de Gourlay ("Monsieur Dégeulasse", with whom, in that society mocks him for his pretensions, I now feel some kindred affection) and his wife and daughters to supper and to dancing. I will give Celia a good quantity of champagne in the hope that it will make her kind.

  As the day approaches, the weather has turned very pretty, the fine frost of the mornings cut like diamonds by an unclouded sun. It is most pleasant to walk in my park with the Musikmeister and hear him agree to collude with my plan, which is that during the time when Celia is sitting for the portrait we shall retire together to some place where we shall not be overheard (I suggested the cellars, but Hummel is mortally afraid to set eyes on a rat there, so we have agreed upon the summer-house) and he will teach me, in secret, to master my instrument. I have impressed upon him that there is not much time, that before this spring comes I expect my wife to have returned to London. "But it is my dearest wish," I told him, "before I lose her and do not set eyes upon her again for months, or even years, to play for one of her songs – and just the one will satisfy me – a perfect accompaniment. If you will help me
to do that, Herr Hummel, you will have my lasting gratitude."

  The Musikmeister looked me up and down, as if expecting to find somewhere on my unpromising person some infinitesimal piece of evidence of musicality. Finding none, he had the courtesy to smile (where the uncouth Finn would have sneered) and promised me that he would do all he could. I see now that my first opinion of him was accurate: he is an honest and agreeable man, as indeed one might expect any friend of Sir Joshua's to be. And so I fall to pondering the truth of my own words to Celia. Does music teach wisdom? Does it civilise the soul? If all the men and women of England were plucking at strings and lisping into reeds would the mind of the nation be quieter and more comfortable with itself?

  This, then, is the night of the day of the twenty-seventh of January 1665, my thirty-eighth birthday, and I will tell you of certain disturbing things that came to pass upon it. (I note for you in parentheses how agreeable I find the phrase "came to pass" which I do not believe existed in the body of the language until King James's mighty scholars sat down and alchemised it from ancient sacred tongues and put it there.)

  The day did not begin as I had imagined. I did not lie under my turquoise canopy dreaming sportive dreams till mid-morning, but rose early to find myself wondering whether I could hope for any gifts. I am childishly excited by presents, however insignificant they may be and always feel most grateful to the giver. The notion that I might pass the day without receiving one gift whatsoever depressed me not a little. At such moments of despondency, I long not merely to see the King, but to be the King, surrounded as he is by people pressing one upon another to lay offerings at his feet.

  Knowing such thoughts to be most silly, I rose and washed my eyes and face, put on a brocaded gown and descended to my kitchen, where it amuses me sometimes to concoct for myself the kind of unskilled meal that I once made upon my fire in my rooms at Ludgate. My breakfast, then, consisted of a dish of eggs coddled with cream, upon which I laid some salted anchovies – a rather excellent invention, which I ate by the kitchen range.

  Will Gates found me there and informed me that a carter had arrived from London, bringing "a quantity of furs", these of course being the tabards made of badger pelts by old Trench. There were ten of them, each very adroitly sewn, with a badger's snout rearing up on either shoulder and a row of tails forming a black fringe around the hem. Having examined them (Trench, as instructed, had used a good woollen cloth for the linings), I persuaded Will to put his on. He protested at first, saying that he would not feel nimble nor ready for work in such a garment. "Will," I said, "do not be pettish. They have been designed to leave the limbs free and agile." Alas, Will did look somewhat awkward and hampered by his tabard. He is a very short, thin man and the garment appeared both too wide for him and too long, so that the badger tails trailed upon the floor and the badger snouts hung off his shoulders somewhat dejectedly. I could not suppress a little attack of mirth.

  "Alas, Will," I said, "I think your particular tabard will have to be altered."

  "It's not worth the expense, Sir," said Will, heaving the thing over his hard little head, "for I shall not wear it."

  "You will wear it," I declared. "This entire household will keep these things upon them until springtime, thus preventing chills and agues and all manner of ailments."

  "Forgive me, Sir Robert," said Will, "but I shall not."

  "You will, Will," I said feebly, but though I am master of my house and Will is an excellent servant, I could plainly see that upon this subject there is going to be some conflict between us.

  Having dressed myself and put my own tabard on, I went in search of the Musikmeister, to whom I would offer to lend one during our chilly hours in the summer-house. Though my tabard feels, I admit, somewhat heavy, it imparts to the body an immediate and agreeable warmth. Furthermore, I look outlandish in it and require only some bizarre hat or headdress of fur to resemble very nicely the Russians of my dreams. And then a teasing thought entered my mind: Would the King not be amused by such a garment? Should I dare, on this my birthday that promised to be empty of gifts, to despatch one to Whitehall? Was it possible that my imagination could be father to a new Royal fashion? How excellent it would be if, when Celia returned to Court, she found all the fops and gallants hung with badger fur and the words "tablier Merivel" upon all their laughing lips!

  Determining to give the matter some deep thought (the King had sent me his gift of surgical instruments; would he be offended by some return gift from me?), I got my oboe and went to the room of Herr Hummel and from there we made our way, unseen by any, to the summer-house.

  The place was indeed cold and not a little triste, the windows latticed over with cobwebs and the floor strewn with downy feathers, as if a dove chick had flown into the humble habitation and exploded in mid-air. I apologised to Herr Hummel, who had wisely put on his tabard, informing him that in summer the place was very pleasant and expressing my hope that he would return to visit me during that kinder season. He thanked me and suggested we begin upon the lesson straight away, before our fingers became too numb. He requested that I play a few scales for him, followed by "some short piece of your choice". This could only be Swans Do All A-Swimming Go, it being the one thing I could play from beginning to end without fault.

  He listened. His face betrayed no scorn or dismay. When I had finished, he did allow himself the ghost of a sigh. "Very well," he said. "I think we must begin again. You are self-tutored, perhaps?"

  "Yes, entirely."

  "And, alas, the fingering is awkward, Sir Robert, and the position of the lips upon the reed too forward. You must whisper to your reed, you see. Not kiss or suck it."

  "Ah."

  "But you will learn quickly, I think. You have the zeal to learn."

  "Yes. Zeal I have."

  "So."

  Here, Herr Hummel gently took my instrument from me, blew away my spittle and raised it to his own mouth, making some strange contortions with his lips before allowing them to settle in a hesitant-seeming posture around the reed. He then bid me watch carefully the fingering he employed for the scale of C, his hands seeming hardly to move at all. I noticed that his fingers are white and slender, as if the bone had coloured the flesh, whereas mine are somewhat red and plump. Clearly, I have not been fashioned to be an oboe player. I determined, however, that this would not make me lose heart. Music – that plaintive song at my wedding – had made me turn my face from medicine. For all those lost years of work, it owed me some recompense.

  This first lesson lasted for the best part of an hour, during which time our breath clouded the glass panels of the summer-house and my feet seemed clamped into iron shoes, so achingly chill did they become. Did I make a little progress? I do not really know. And so cold was I by the end of the hour that I did not care. Such is the burden of our human clay: our spirits soar to some icy heaven while our bodies creep back to the tame hearth.

  My invitation to Dégeulasse and his family had been accepted with alacrity and (still giftless towards two o'clock, no one at all having made any reference to my birthday) I was comforting myself by planning my soirée when a village boy rode up my drive on a donkey bringing a message from the vicar of Bidnold, the Reverend Timothy Sackpole. I was requested to come at once to the church.

  "Why?" I enquired of the boy.

  "I do not know, Sir."

  "How like a clergyman, not to give a reason!"

  "Except that it be dire and urgent."

  "That is not a reason, lad. That is a tick of the ecclesiastical mind."

  As my horse was being saddled, this thought assailed me: had the conceited Sackpole somehow found out that this day saw the dawn of my thirty-ninth year? Did he foresee some divine punishment for this stumbling Aquarian if he were not brought before an altar before the sun set? Being only a little past the shortest day of the year, the sun was indeed going down already – hence the supposed urgency of the message? Though it amuses me to go now and again to hear a sermon from Sackpole, I am
not seen at church as often as I should be, preferring to send my prayers to God in the quiet of my room or (as already described) in the company of a lardy cake. It was thus quite possible that this clergyman, who strikes me as a petulant person, should wish to deliver himself of some reprimand, the tone and substance of which I could already hear in my mind. He would begin by asking me to what I had given any thought on this the anniversary of my birth. I would reply that my mind had circled vainly about an empty table on which I had imagined Celia placing the gift of an embossed music case or a handsome picture frame. He would answer that such preoccupations will bar me from the Kingdom of Heaven…

  But it was not to be thus. When I arrived at the churchyard, I saw in the light of the declining sun a small throng of people grouped about the gate and heard the sound of voices and weeping.

  "Whatever is it?" I enquired of the boy on the donkey, but he did not reply; he was staring at the scene with some alarm.

  I dismounted. As I did so, the Reverend Sackpole came towards me.

  "Ah," I said, "what have we here, Vicar?"

  "Thank you for coming, Sir Robert," Sackpole said courteously, thus putting from my mind the suspicion that he was about to lecture me upon my lack of faith. "It seems we have need of a medical man and Doctor Murdoch is not to be found."

  "Sackpole," I said, "I was once a student of medicine, but my studies were never completed. I am not equipped – "

  "No great skill is being asked of you. Let us step aside a little from these good people – the boy will hold your horse -and I will explain what has happened."

  "Assure me first that you do not expect me to start saving lives."

  "What is requested of you, Sir, is your judgement."

  "My judgement? Well, let me tell you, Vicar, that that is not perhaps as sound as it once was. I am most prone to error."

  "Not one of us is infallible, Sir Robert, but this may prove to be a simple matter for you. Come."