Restoration Page 24

  Washing herself, I have observed, solaces her, particularly the washing of her feet, over which task I have seen her fall into a kind of trance. At one Night Keeping, I discussed this last phenomenon with Ambrose. The next day, he told me that he had spent the rest of the night awake, reading his medical books and had come upon something that he had half remembered – that the rubbing of the soles of the feet with black soap may succeed in drawing down from the brain the noisiness within it and so still it and let it rest.

  This cure, then, I have begun to try upon Katharine. I sit by her and put her naked feet upon my lap, a cloth under them, and some warm water near me in a bowl. And I immerse the black soap in the water and hold her ankles with one hand and with the other chafe the soles of her feet with the soap. Always, she sits quietly while I perform this somewhat strange task and watches me intently, as if I were some work of ancient art recently excavated from a tomb.

  My arm and wrist tire easily. I have not the stamina for this task of foot rubbing that I would like. But if I can continue with it beyond twenty minutes, I am rewarded by seeing Katharine's stare fade and her eyes blink and her head begin to fall onto her chest. Three times, she has truly fallen asleep for several minutes without any spasm or convulsion coming upon her, but the moment I cease my rubbing with the soap, she wakes. And now I feel most vexed that Ambrose and I have discovered a thing which is and yet is not a cure.

  Still no opinions have been offered upon my outpouring at the Meeting. Pearce has informed me that the Friends are pondering my ideas, "somewhat forward and arrogant though your speech was, Robert", but this is all. But I am privately pursuing my search for the footsteps of Katharine's madness, in the expectation that these, when revealed to me, will help me to make her well. And it has been made plain to me through this search that Katharine is a woman of a most loving yet childish nature. So, together with Eleanor, who is gifted at sewing, I have made Katharine a doll out of rags (its face painted in oils by me with a small brush) imagining that if she were to grow to love it, it might comfort her at night, just as a doll or toy will comfort a child. It is a very crude thing, having no hands nor feet nor hair and dressed in a simple smock which, immediately the doll was given to her, Katharine removed and tore in pieces. She stared at the doll for a long time. After a while, she pulled some straw from her mattress and made a kind of nest of it on the stone floor and then laid the doll in the straw and called to the women near her to see what she had done. They pressed round her. One laughed a high squawking laugh, another tried to talk, but could only drool and dribble. Katharine looked from them to the straw and to them again. " Bethlehem," she said.

  Now, at night, she says prayers to the doll, which she does not touch, but which has become the centre of her vigil. She believes it to be a little replica of the infant Jesus. The fact that its face – if it is like a human face at all – more nearly resembles the face of Rosie Pierpoint than that of a newborn Christ is of no consequence to her. It is the Jesus of her imagination that she sees.

  With the coming in of the month of May, news came to us from Earls Bride that the plague, whispered about for so long, had taken hold in London, "so that there is a weekly tally of deaths now that is above seven hundred."

  We were told "on the good authority of some upon the staging coach" that the King had removed himself and his Court to Hampton Court but might not be safe there for long. An outbreak of such virulence, said the people of Earls Bride, would creep outwards on the waterways and on the wind and the people themselves, fleeing the city, would bring it into all the shires upon their breath.

  The Keepers of Whittlesea sat down by their fire and folded their hands and asked Jesus "not to sew the poisoned seed of the Black Death among us, that the suffering we daily witness here be not added to."

  It was then proposed by Edmund (whose eyes and beard shine with such health that it is most difficult to imagine him laid low even by an ague) that the gates of Whittlesea Hospital be closed, allowing no one in except those from whom we buy straw and wood and flour and meat.

  Since we are a forgotten place, few people ever make their way here and I remarked therefore that Edmund's proposed precaution was scarcely necessary. It was Ambrose who reminded me that from time to time the relatives of those incarcerated here make the journey from London or Lynn or Newmarket to visit them, bringing provisions, money and clothing. "And it is these," he said, "whom we must – for as long as the epidemic may last – turn away."

  Eleanor, Hannah and Edmund nodded in agreement. Daniel rose and made an arch of his hands in front of his mouth and started blowing into it, like someone trying to teach himself to whistle. Pearce sniffed and took from his pocket his little phial of mithridate. He then delivered himself of his opinion that these visits of relatives "are all that defines time for certain of our Decayed Friends. If we prohibit them," he said, "we shall lose many of them to vacancy and so to despair."

  I have noticed that the Keepers of Whittlesea are very courteous to each other in argument, Pearce alone among them being given to fits of sulking. And so it was that the closing of the gates to visitors was now discussed in a most amiable way, each one putting forward an opinion and listening politely to those that countered it. Only Daniel remained outside the argument, now and then through his cupped hands making a very peculiar noise a little resembling the hoot of an owl I used to hear from my bedroom at Bidnold. No one paid this any attention at all.

  I found myself on the side of Pearce. I knew, for instance, that Katharine's mother had promised to visit her in the summertime and that she longed for this day and hoped her mother would put her arms around her. The notion that, because of our own fear, we would turn this woman away made me feel most uncomfortable. But Ambrose was very passionate in defence of Edmund's proposal. Better that some here should suffer deprivation and loneliness, he declared, than that we should perish and the Hospital fall to ruin. "For where," he asked, "would the survivors go then but to the London Bedlam, which is the saddest place on earth? And there, in all probability die from the very pestilence from which we are trying to protect them!"

  Being a large man with mighty lungs, the voice of Ambrose is very big. To me, it appeared to fill up the small parlour so completely that when Pearce spoke again his voice sounded faint and reedy, as if there was no room for it.

  And so it was decided: from that very night, the gates would be barred and under the inscription "I have refined thee in the furnace of affliction" would be posted a bill, giving notice that in time of plague no visitors whomsoever would be admitted to Whittlesea. Provisions or money could be left in a basket and would be given to the one for whom they were intended. The well being or otherwise of any inmate could be ascertained by means of a letter to the Keepers.

  Pearce was most unhappy with the decision, his disquiet causing a copious running of phlegm from his sore nostrils. And it made me feel afraid. I fell prey to the notion that all the world I had known and loved outside Whittlesea would sicken and die and that we and our hundred tormented souls would be the last beings left alive in England.

  And so May came in, hot and still, and the light on the flat horizon danced.

  So little rain had fallen since my arrival that we were forced to get water from our well to irrigate our vegetable plot and the nodules of fruit on Pearce's pear trees began to appear wizened, like the cods of an old man.

  The primrose season was past and the grass in the ditches was brown and dry. Though Pearce talked of making us nosegays to sweeten our air and drive away the plague germ, he could find no flowers but a few late jonquils with which to make them.

  Edmund who, as I have told you, loved a deluge for washing in, declared the heat to be "foul type of weather, ripening nothing but disease" and took to wearing his hat at all times.

  I remembered the winter and the snow on my park and my thoughts about Russians, but these things seemed so very distant, it was almost impossible to believe that they had ever been.

 
The air of the nights seemed not much cooler than that of the days and in them I found sleep difficult, so it became my habit to get up many times in each night; sometimes only to stare out of my window in the direction of Earls Bride and then lie down again; sometimes to tuck my nightgown into a pair of breeches and put on my shoes and go quietly out to Margaret Fell and see whether or not Katharine was sleeping.

  I had continued daily with the rubbing of her feet with black soap and I had begun to have some hope for this cure. I could now pause in the task or cease altogether and she would stay asleep for an hour. And whenever I looked at her sleeping thus, I would feel very moved by my own success.

  So now, if I found her awake in the hot nights, talking to her doll Jesus, pulling her nightclothes or braiding and unbraiding her hair, I would sit down on the floor beside her pallet and bid her lie down, and then I would place her feet in my lap and begin rubbing them, not with any soap but only with the palm of my hand, and in not many minutes I would see her eyes close and a merciful wave of sleep come over her.

  One night, being very tired out of this wakefulness of May, I too fell asleep on the floor of Margaret Fell while rubbing Katharine's feet and when I woke up I saw that Katharine had laid her blanket over me. I might have stayed some while at her side if there had not begun all around me an early morning clamour of the women to piss, so that everywhere I looked they were squatting down on their buckets and the smell of urine quite overpowered me and drove me out into the dawn.

  I went to visit Danseuse, who is most plagued by flies in this hot weather, and I laid my head against her neck and thought about the early morning coming slowly to the Thames, unseen by Celia asleep with the King at Hampton Court. And I remembered Celia's longing for a child and began to wonder whether, in her, the King would create yet another bastard, while with his own Queen he could not produce an heir. These reveries are interrupted by the stamping of Danseuse who, since we rode inside the Whittlesea gates, has been restless and prone to fear. If she were not the only precious thing I own, I would open the gates and let her gallop away.

  Some days after this, a great storm moved in over the Fens and the hard earth of Whittlesea was turned once more to mud. Pearce called all the Keepers together in the parlour after our mid-day broth to offer up thanks for the rain falling on his lettuces and his beans. These prayers done, Edmund took up his soap and undressed himself and went out into the deluge but returned, very agitated, a moment later to announce to us that two visitors were at the gates, an old woman and her daughter clamouring to be let in.

  "Ambrose," said Pearce, "will you leave these people out in the storm?"

  Ambrose went to the window: "The storm is moving east," he said. "It is passing."

  "They must not come in!" said Edmund.

  "No," said Ambrose, "they must not come in. And they will not. They will read the bill we have posted and they will leave."

  "How if they cannot read?" asked Pearce.

  Ambrose hesitated a moment before replying. "One of us will go to the gate and talk to them through the grille."

  "I shall go," offered Hannah.

  "No," said Ambrose calmly. "Edmund will go. He will go directly, for he does not mind the rain."

  I watched from the door of Whittlesea House as Edmund, naked except for his frayed under-drawers, jogged out to the gate, soaping his chest as he went, and stuck his head into the small iron grille inset into the heavy portal. I could not hear what he said, for the drumming of the rain on the earth and on the buildings was very loud. Nor could I, from this vantage point, see the visitors, but it appeared they were very insistent for Edmund was so long at the gate he had succeeded in washing all of himself except his legs while he parleyed with them.

  He at last came away and bent down to soap his knees and his calves. By this time, however, the storm had indeed moved off in an easterly direction and there was not enough rain falling to rinse off the lather he had made. Edmund threw his head back and glared angrily at the clearing sky before making his way to the pump, where he completed his ablutions. Only then did he return to us and tell us that the visitors had been the mother and sister of my would-be murderer, Piebald, and that they had come out from Puckeridge, some way north of London.

  I went up to my room, which is indeed more of a room to me now and less of a linen cupboard, and looked out over the wall that surrounds us to the Earls Bride marshes. On the road to the village, I could see two figures walking, dressed in the clothes of very poor people. Every few steps, they turned and looked back towards us. Then the younger woman put her arm round the shoulders of the older one and they walked on until I could see them no more. Only after they had disappeared from my sight did I "see" that the younger of the two, Piebald's sister, carried a basket that appeared heavy. No doubt they had come with provisions and, being turned away by Edmund, had not thought to leave these at the gate.

  It was this knowledge – no less, perhaps, than the knowledge that these women were Piebald's kin – that made me swiftly descend the stairs and inform Ambrose that I was going to ride after the visitors to retrieve the gifts they had forgotten to leave.

  "Very well," said Ambrose, "but do not go so near them that you breathe their breath."

  "They do not have the plague, Ambrose. There is no plague at Puckeridge."

  "That we cannot know, Robert. The germ has come north to us from Southern Europe and so may still be moving in a northerly way."

  "Very well. I will not go near them, but call out to them to put down their offerings, which I will then retrieve. Are you content that I should do that?"

  "Yes."

  "And say," intervened Pearce, "that we are sorry for their wasted journey."

  "I will, John."

  And so I went out to put a saddle on Danseuse whom I had not ridden for a long time. The storm had quite gone and, in the bright sun once again shining on us, the inmates of Margaret Fell were assembling for their airing, but I gave them no thought, my mind being intent only upon overtaking the visitors.

  At the sight of a saddle, Danseuse gave a whinny of joy and her flanks shivered as I tightened the girth. And immediately I had mounted her, she began to trot very fast towards the gate, thus causing some fright to the women walking round the oak tree. I tried to rein her in, but she pulled so hard with her head that I was jerked forward and almost lost my balance. Then Daniel opened the gate for us and we were out of Whittlesea and at once my splendid mare began to gallop like a chariot horse and in no time at all we had reached the straggle of poor houses that is Earls Bride.

  I had expected to overtake Piebald's visitors before reaching the village, but there was no sign of them. Managing to slow Danseuse to a quiet trot, I passed through Earls Bride and out the other side of it, where the flat, muddy track led on towards March. Because of its flatness, I could see some way down this road and there was nothing and no one visible on it. I persuaded my horse to stop. I dismounted and looked back at the village. As I have informed you, it is a place without an inn or hostelry of any kind, so I could not guess where the two women might be. It was as if the bright air that still smelled of rain had made them vanish.

  Leading Danseuse by the reins, my hand close to the bit, I endeavoured to turn her round so that I could return to the village and knock on the door of one Thomas Buck (who is a thatcher and the only jovial man in this sad community) and enquire of him whether the two women had asked for shelter or rest in any of the houses. But Danseuse would not let herself be turned. She showed me a white, angry eye and reared up, jerking the reins from my hands. I stepped back, involuntarily. She is a large and powerful horse and, discomforting as my life is, I did not wish to be crushed by her hooves and thus lose it altogether on this lonely Fenland causeway.

  But I see now that instead of stepping back, I should have tried with all my might to catch hold of Danseuse's bridle. For I was about to lose her. Once out of the Whittlesea gate, she had smelled her freedom in the sunshine. Now, she saw the straig
ht, flat road before her and she took it. She kicked up her heels in a final little dance of joy and then she bolted away, faster it seemed to me than I had ever ridden her, faster even than on our night journey to Newmarket, and I was left with one foot in the ditch, staring stupidly after her.

  Collecting myself, I did the only thing that came to my mind: I ran after her, shouting her name, the while knowing this action to be futile, as if a chicken tried to fly after an eagle. But then, at my side, appeared two boys, very ragged and with no shoes on their feet, aged about ten or eleven.

  "We'll catch 'im, Sir!" they said and without waiting for permission from me, hurled their thin bodies down the track, calling: "Answers! Answers!" which they thought, from hearing my shouting, to be my horse's name.

  I stopped and took a handkerchief from the pocket of my breeches and wiped the sweat from my face. Then I stood and watched. The speed of Danseuse had not slackened at all, but the boys did not seem to understand how easily she would outrun them, for they bolted gamely on, racing with each other to be the first to get to her and bring her back. I saw one of them stumble on the road made muddy by the storm, but he quickly recovered his balance and charged on. Seeing their determination it was tempting to hope, just for an instant, that if I waited patiently, I would, late in the afternoon, see them return, leading my mare between them. Yet I knew this would not happen. Danseuse would run until night fell. She would run until she was lame. She would never return to Whittlesea.

  In less than five minutes, Danseuse and the boys passed out of sight. Feeling very stupid standing in the road, and remembering at length the errand on which I had come, I walked to the cottage of Thomas Buck. The thatcher was not at home. His scrawny wife, who is like a pullet with no flesh on her bones, informed me she had seen two women pass through the village but now they were gone along the road to March. I thanked her and she closed her door in my face. I had a great longing to sit down.