Restoration Page 25

  Recollected now, that day when I lost Danseuse, that day when Piebald's mother and sister and their basket of provisions seemed to vanish into the air, was one of the most momentous of recent time. For in it I passed from being a kind of visitor to Whittlesea (one who, whenever he heard the whinny of his horse always imagined some future hour in time when he would ride away, back into his old life) to a state of belonging. Since that day, with the stable once occupied by Danseuse empty, I have surrendered to Whittlesea. When I imagine my life passing, it is here that it passes. I shall change utterly. I will no longer be too "restless and dazzling" for fishing. I will be a quiet, brown person. And my skills as a physician and Keeper I shall allow to grow. And I am most moved by all this. For I see that all of it will come about because of Pearce's love for me which allowed me to come here and which – although I really do not know why this should be – is the greatest love I have ever been shown by anyone.

  But I must tell you a little more about that day. Another event of importance took place upon it.

  The urchin boys did not return for an hour, during which I sat on a pile of willow planks and counted the money that I had upon me, which was fourpence exactly.

  They were very disappointed that they had not been able to catch the horse, both for my sake and for theirs, for they clearly understood that there was reward in the thing and when I handed them the two pennies apiece they looked long at the coins, as if willing them to turn into silver.

  I thanked them for their gallant chase and asked them, if Danseuse should return to Earls Bride, to bring her to me at Whittlesea. They nodded and one of them asked: "Why is he called Answers, Sir?" to which question I could think of no reply but the feeble pun, "Because he answers to that name and no other." The boys appeared downcast by this, as well they might, so I left them to go in to their suppers of corn porridge and samphire and walked slowly back to Whittlesea, remembering deliberately as I went along all the daring and brilliant rides I had had on Danseuse since she was given to me from the King's stable; and then, upon arriving at the Whittlesea gate, putting them from me for ever and going in with a sprightly step, as if the loss of my horse was nothing to me.

  I went into the kitchen of the Keepers' house, it being my turn to help Daniel prepare our supper, and there found Ambrose seated at the scrubbed table looking most grave and troubled. He asked me to sit down and I could sense that some news of a terrible kind was going to be given to me. Daniel, scraping potatoes in a bowl, looked from Ambrose to me and then to Ambrose again and said softly to him, "Robert is not at fault in this, Ambrose," and Ambrose nodded.

  There was a long pause, during which Ambrose arranged his hands into their habitual steeple beneath his beard. He then told me, in a most sorrowful voice, that an incident had taken place that afternoon in Margaret Fell while I had been absent. The woman Katharine had bitten and torn her blanket into shreds and with these shreds knotted together a rope and with the rope endeavoured to hang herself from a crossbeam of the roof.

  "Most fortunately," said Ambrose, "the screams of the other women brought us all running and we cut her down before she choked and died. But we cannot run any risk that she will try such a thing again and so, for the time being, we have had to put her in William Harvey."

  The silence of the kitchen was broken only by the scraping of Daniel's knife on the potatoes grown by Pearce. I wished to speak, but felt a great choking in my throat. To hear these things about the one person I had believed I was helping caused such a shock to my mind that I was quite unable to speak. And the revelation that followed was the most terrible of all: when asked by Ambrose why she had tried to kill herself, Katharine had replied simply: "Because Robert has left me. He has ridden away."

  That evening after supper, while the others assembled for their Meeting, I went into Margaret Fell and retrieved from Katharine's place the doll she called Jesus of Bethlehem. Then, breaking the rule that no Keeper must go alone into William Harvey, I went in there and found Katharine who was chained by one foot to the wall. She was sleeping. She had been dosed with laudanum and the smell of it was on her breath. I put the doll into the straw beside her and then came away.

  Chapter Eighteen. A Tarantella

  I could not sleep that night. Near one o'clock, I rose and lit a lamp, being suddenly very tired of the darkness. And in the yellow lamplight I examined my hands, which is a thing I do sometimes when I am troubled, and in consequence I know the appearance of my hands extraordinarily well. My fingers are wide and red and the ends of them very flat, with flat nails. My palms are moist and hot. On the backs of my hands are a few hairs and some freckles. They are Merivel's hands, not Robert's, yet when they take up the scalpel they do not tremble and they do not err.

  It was not my turn for a Night Keeping, but at two, I heard Ambrose and Edmund get up, so I pulled on my breeches and my boots and took my lamp and joined them. On our way to William Harvey (where, in truth, I hoped to find Katharine awake so that she could see me and know I had not abandoned her) Ambrose whispered to me: "The diseased mind, alas, is more prey to violent affections than that which is well."

  I smiled. "I know that well, Ambrose," I said.

  "Whereas," continued Ambrose, "the true saint loves all men and yet none in particular. And this is a vow that we, the Keepers, have taken at Whittlesea – to emulate the love of saints."

  He said nothing more, only strode on very fast, but I knew that I had been reproached. I turned to Edmund, who still walked in step with me. "It was pity for Katharine, for her condition – which touches upon several unanswered questions in my own life – that moved me to help her, Edmund," I said.

  "I neither gave to her, nor sought from her, any promises of love."

  "I believe you, Robert."

  "But we cannot, each on our own, help all of them…"

  "Although it is precisely this that we must try to do."

  "And I believed that if I could just help one…"

  "What did you believe?"

  "That I would know at last that I was useful."

  "Useful?"

  "Yes."

  "And why should you assume you were not already useful?"

  "Because… it was once told to me."

  "By whom?"

  "By whom does not matter. That I believed him is what has counted with me."

  "But it should not trouble you now, Robert. You are 'useful' to Whittlesea. All I would counsel is that, from now on, you stay away from Katharine."

  "And yet…"

  "Ambrose would say there can be no 'and yets'."

  "I was so near to a cure for her!"

  "Perhaps that is somewhat arrogant. Cures are not performed by us, Robert. Only Jesus cures. And we are his agents."

  We were at William Harvey by this time and Ambrose had already gone in. Familiarity with this most wretched place has not lessened my loathing of it. Piebald knows how much I fear it and likes to play upon my fears. "Does it swallow you?" he asks. "Is it like the grave to your little soul?"

  Mercifully, he was asleep that night with his snout in the straw, but as I passed him I noted, as if for the first time, how sinewy and fleshless are his neck and his limbs and I thought of his vanished provisions and then of the probability that if, one day, I unlocked Piebald from his chains and asked him to kill me with his hands, he would no longer have the strength.

  Despite Edmund's advice, I went at once to the stall where Katharine was lying. I bent over her. She had woken from her laudanum sleep, but the opiate was still in her blood and she lay without moving. When she saw me, she attempted to sit up and in trying to move her leg found herself held down by the iron cuff on her ankle. She opened her mouth to cry out, but no sound came from her. I was about to reach out and put a hand on her forehead to calm her when Ambrose came into the stall. He knelt down and lifted Katharine a little and held a cup of water to her lips and she drank, but she did not look at Ambrose nor at the cup, but only at me and as she lapped the water her eyes fil
led with oily tears. "Speak to her," Ambrose said quietly. "Tell her you are not leaving Whittlesea, for your life is here now."

  I endeavoured to do this. "My horse has ridden away," I said, "so there will be no more going out of the gate. And I shall be – "

  I could not finish the sentence. Ambrose finished it for me: "With us all," he said. "Robert is with us all."

  And I nodded. And Ambrose took away the water cup and lay Katharine down. And into my mind came the image of the husband, the stone mason laying his wife down on the bowed backs of the vaults and unbuttoning himself and asking of her acts of submission in the very roof of God's house.

  Two days later, Katharine was returned to Margaret Fell. Ambrose instructed me in what he called "new ways" of caring for her. I could visit her only once each day and not at all during the night, except when it was my turn for a Night Keeping. The duration of my visits to her should not exceed half an hour. I was permitted to continue rubbing her feet with soap, "but only with the soap, Robert, and not with your naked palm", and told to show her no more attention that I would show to any in George Fox. "In this way," said Ambrose, "her affection for you will be held in check, but beware above all, Robert, that you do not let it flatter you and so seek it out."

  I replied, as truthfully as I could, that I sought nothing from Katharine at all, only to find a cure for her sleeplessness.

  "A cure!" said Ambrose. "I know of no other word that so beguiles us. Yet you, as a physician, know that certain states and conditions are not susceptible to cure – unless there be some intervention from God."

  "I accept that," I said. "But with regard to sleep, I have recently begun to comprehend some of its mysteries…"

  "I know you believe you do, Robert. Yet it may be that you are not yet as learned on the subject as you think yourself. Time will tell you, no doubt."

  I sighed, being crestfallen by Ambrose's severity.

  "Time!" I said moodily. "I was once told I was a man of my time, but at some moment – and I could not precisely say when – I think that my time and I parted company, and now I do not belong to it at all, indeed I do not really belong anywhere…"

  "Beware your very vast self-pity, Robert," said Ambrose, "and bend your thoughts and your energies instead towards music."

  "Towards music?"

  "Yes. John and I and the others have now pondered long enough upon some words you spoke at a Meeting in spring. And we concede that to organise a little dancing – on midsummer's day perhaps? – might have some beneficial effect upon us all. So what do you say? Will you play for us?"

  I looked up at Ambrose. His large face had a large grin upon it. I cleared my throat.

  "I am not… as marvellous a player as I would like to be, Ambrose," I said. "Before I came here, I was getting some oboe lessons from a German teacher, but they were curtailed."

  "Well, we are speaking of simple tunes, are we not: a polka, a tarantella?"

  "Yes…"

  "Will you do it?"

  "If there was any among us who played a string… then the sound would be somewhat better and more rounded."

  "Talk to Daniel. He has learned the fiddle and the two of you can rehearse your pieces in the parlour."

  Ambrose left me then and I sat down in the kitchen, where this conversation had taken place, and began to imagine the women of Margaret Fell and the men of George Fox coming out into the sunshine and hearing music and looking about them stupidly, some of them being uncertain whether the sounds were there in the air or only there in their minds. The thought made me smile.

  I took a radish from a bowl on the table and ate it and the harsh taste of it reminded me of my curing of Lou-Lou and, in the midst of my contentment about the forthcoming dancing at Whittlesea, I had a moment's longing for the sight of the old noisy river.

  That evening, after spending my allotted half hour with Katharine (who, when I am with her is, in five minutes, soothed and calmed by my touching of her feet, so that she falls asleep with a strange smile on her face) I went to my room and unwrapped my oboe from the words of Plato, inserted a new reed into the mouthpiece and began to play a scale or two with the correct fingering taught to me by Herr Hummel. To hold the instrument in my hands again gave me a feeling of peculiar happiness. I did not in the least mind the monotony of the scales, but rather delighted in them, endeavouring to play them faster and faster and finding my clumsy fingers almost adequate to the task.

  I then paused, dried the reed, and embarked upon Swans Do All A-Swimming Go which, notwithstanding that my instrument was a little out of tune and my tuning skills very paltry, I declare I played more sweetly than I had ever done in the summer-house at Bidnold. As I finished the piece, there was a knock on my door. I opened it and found Eleanor there. "Robert," she said, "may I come in and listen to you? May I listen for a short while?"

  "Well," I said, "you are welcome, but the while will be exceedingly short, for that little song is the only piece I know!"

  As I have told you, Eleanor is a person of great good nature and, although I knew her to be disappointed at the severe limitations to my repertoire, she did not show her disappointment, but only said brightly, "Why then, play that one again." So she sat down on my bed (a cot it is rather, not a true real bed) which is the only place where one is able to sit in my linen cupboard, and I played the Swans for her a second time and when I had finished, she wiped her eyes with her apron and pronounced the music "most sweet."

  Now, this week, with midsummer approaching and the stifling weather still with us and all of Whittlesea plagued by flies, I pass much of each day with Daniel who, just as I had imagined, is quite adept as a fiddle player and whose goal it now is to teach me to play on my oboe simple accompaniments to three or four sprightly tunes for which he possesses sheets of music so seemingly ancient and yellow and bedraggled it is as if they had once been dredged from the sea by Sir Walter Raleigh. One is called Une Tarentelle de Lyon and was composed by a person who signs himself Ch. de B. Fauconnier, and this piece is so fast that firstly, I cannot keep up with it on my instrument and, secondly, I wonder if Ch. de B. Fauconnier did not go mad in the writing of it and end his days in a Lyonnais asile. As I muse on this possibility, Daniel chides me gently for "having the habit of talking too much."

  The anniversary of my wedding, the seventh of June, has come and gone. It is most strange to reflect that, when I put on my purple garb and my three-masted barque, I imagined that here was a new beginning that would bind my life ever more firmly to the life of the King; and to understand now that my wedding day began for me nothing at all but a year of great loneliness and striving and ridicule.

  Though determined not to dwell upon any memory of my wedding, I did find myself waking very early on the morning of the seventh of June and recalling how I had gone out from the feast and flung myself on the lawn of Sir Joshua's house and cried, there to be found by Pearce, to whose life I do indeed seem to be bound and without whom I would truly feel myself to be very alone. And it came into my mind to thank Pearce, there and then, for his friendship, to tell him how, in my least action, I try to measure in my mind how he would see the thing and judge it. And how in this way -though I sometimes rail against it – he is present in all that I do, so that for as long as I live (whether here with him or elsewhere) he will always be with me, like Jesus Christ is with the true believers. But I did not stir, only lay on my little bed and watched the sunrise, and thought of my friend asleep, holding his ladle.

  In my struggles with Une Tarentelle de Lyon and the other dances, I soon pushed from my mind my wedding day thoughts. Daniel, being a far less condescending teacher than Musikmeister Hummel, has succeeded in teaching me a great deal in a short while and I feel, in the making of this music, some of that uncontrollable excitement that afflicted me when I did my wild, splodged painting of my park. Hours pass and we play on, struggling always for a faster tempo, and these rehearsals of ours have brought great jollity to the house, the Friends clustering round us and
clapping their hands and Edmund unable to restrain himself from skipping about.

  "Music!" thunders Ambrose after grace one suppertime. "Why was music not always with us at Whittlesea?" And I look round the table at the faces which all nod in agreement and I marvel suddenly, that these Quakers, who love plainness in all things and loathe and detest the sung services of the High Church, should be so taken with the mad gallop of Ch. de B. Fauconnier that when at last we strike up our tarantella for the inmates of our Bedlam I am certain that Ambrose and Pearce and Edmund and Eleanor and Hannah will be the leaders of the mad revels.

  Very seldom do letters arrive at Whittlesea, it being a deliberately forgotten place. The mail coach goes to Earls Bride and no further, so that any letters for Whittlesea are brought out to us by the village children and a penny given to them for each one delivered.

  Since my coming here, I have written only one letter – to Will Gates whom I presume still to be at Bidnold. In some very inadequate sentences, I thanked him for all his pains on my behalf and apologised to him for the change in my fortunes. I asked him to keep for himself the painted cage of the Indian Nightingale and to be assured always of my affection for him.

  I had received no reply, nor expected any. Writing words on paper is not one of Will's gifts. However, one day before the dance, as the Airing Court was being swept, an urchin arrived at the gate bearing a letter for me. It was from Will. It read thus:

  Good Sir Robert,

  Your servant W. Gates is most thankful of your kindnesses, one and many, to him. He is well sorry for your departing. You are in his memory in the cage, kindly given. And will be therefor always.