Merivel A Man of His Time (16 page)

Yet, still, the taunting of the Bear angered me. ‘Throw sticks at me, if you must,’ I wanted to say to the rude lads and ragged little wenches, ‘but spare this animal, for it has done you no harm.’

Christmas was upon us, but I commanded that there be no feast.

Snow fell silently and made walls and mounds all around us where none had ever been, and I began to be afraid that we would want for food, for that no Butchers’ nor Fishmongers’ carts could pass in the great press of snow on the drive, and many of our Chickens were dying, and all our winter vegetables were smothered three feet deep in the ground.

I sent for Cattlebury and asked him how we stood as to Supplies, and he assured me that he, ‘sensing in my bones a cold Season’, had been laying down Potatoes, Onions, Neaps and Carrots, as well as sacks of flour, in the dark of the cellar and that we would all live off these ‘and not suffer for it’.

‘And when these are gone?’ said I.

‘We will kill the Deer,’ he said. ‘Venison is a lovely meat, Sir Robert.’

I sent him away. I climbed the stairs to Margaret’s room, where Tabitha, draped in Muslin round her face, kept quiet watch. For all that a fire burned there, and every window was tightly closed, it felt chill. And when I approached the bed I noticed, for the first time, a foul Cancre blistering the skin of Margaret’s lip.

Every incremental torment brought to her by the Typhus – from the looseness of her stool to the Convulsions of her stomach and the great Agony in her brain, relieved only by Opium – caused me such helpless anxiety that I had almost lost the art of sleeping at all.
And
when Tabitha and I undertook to wash Margaret, which we did very often, for that she soiled herself and could not help it, I now began to see that her body was wasting away.

And I was taken again in my mind to that time when John Pearce began to die, and I remembered how his coming death had been visible to me in the scanty flesh that clothed his bones, and how I had known – for all my long studies in Medicine – that I could do nothing to save him.

As I stared at the horrible Cancre on Margaret’s lip, I began to have the feeling that her life was lost. I knelt by her side. I clung to her sheet, twisting it in my hands. And my prayer was to Pearce: ‘Help me! For the sake of our past Friendship, help me to save her!’

His only answer was that sudden quiet – in which all the World seems to withhold its breath for a long minute – that I have termed ‘The Silence of Pearce’. Though, many times in my life, I have got consolation from this strange taking away of sound and movement, its manifest uselessness to me now put me into a sudden anger. I wanted to scream and cry, and break my hand hitting out at the wall.

I ran downstairs, snatched up my warmest Cloak and went out into the snow, hoping that a walk in the icy park would calm me. The Servants had cleared a passage through the great drifts from the house to the Barns and I followed the narrow path they had made, and for a companion I suddenly had a Hen, who appeared from I know not where and, with delicate steps, hastened along beside me.

The Hen and I, with bright and hectic eyes, looked out at the frozen land.

The Beech Trees, which had borne the tracery of the Frost with sumptuous grace, now looked lumpen and shapeless, with the great weight of snow upon them. And I was afraid that their limbs would break under the burden of it, and the thought that my trees would be brought low made my fury increase.

I walked on. My breath billowed before me in a blueish Vapour and I felt the sharp stab of the frozen air in my lung. The green parkland around me had folded itself into sweeping white Dunes, shaped by the wind. To the Hen, who had to make little flapping
runs
to keep up with me but seemed determined to do so, as though she lacked companionship, I remarked: ‘These snow Dunes are like the sands of a Desert.’

That same night, lying on a rug on the floor in Margaret’s room and sleeping a little, I had a dream of Pearce.

He walked towards me along a riverbank, and the river was silvered with the sun and all the weeds that grew along the bank were lush and vigorous and bright.

‘Pearce,’ said I in my dream, ‘here you are at last. Tell me what I can do to save my daughter. I
beg
you to tell me.’

Pearce sat down among the weeds, which seemed to hold him securely in a green Chair. He would not deign to look up at me, but after a moment or two had passed, while the water flowed sweetly on, he said: ‘Go where you always go. Go where you cannot prevent yourself from going.’

I was silent. It was always one of Pearce’s most perturbing tricks to talk to me in Riddles, and very often these Riddles would not come to any solution at all, and I would be left only with a sense of my own obtuseness.

‘Where is that?’ said my dreaming self. ‘You must tell me where, Pearce.’

But, to my dismay, he rose from his soft chaise of greenery and made as though to walk away from me.

‘Don’t go!’ I pleaded. ‘Tell me what I must do!’

He stopped and stood still, and I saw that he carried in his hands the blue-and-white soup ladle, and I cried out: ‘I am glad that you have got the ladle, Pearce! I am very glad for your sake that it is not lost.’

Ignoring this, yet cradling the implement to his thin body, he said: ‘Imagine you are a Slave at the time of Julius Caesar. That Slave suffers from that same deep forgetfulness of his own Absence of Freedom that afflicts you, does he not?’

‘Well—’

‘Imagine, then, if you were that same Slave and a terrible affliction or sadness came upon you; where would you go to ask for help?’

I hesitated a moment, then I said: ‘I suppose that I would go to Caesar.’

‘Of course you would. For in your heart you
love
your servitude to him; that is why you are still a Slave. So there is your answer. You must go to Caesar.’

Your Majesty
, I wrote,

Your Servant Merivel sends you his Affectionate Greeting from the Snow Deserts of Norfolk, where we are walled up in a Great Whiteness, the like of which I have never before seen
.

I do not know how this Letter will reach you, for that no Letter-Bearer, nor cart can make its way to Bidnold. But I write, in part, to try to assuage my Mind, which is in Mortal Anguish
.

Sir, Margaret is dying of Typhus
.

I am trying every remedy that I know of, but I do see that, as the days pass, these remedies are failing. If any Physician at Whitehall, with better knowledge of this foul Disease than I, has some counsel I might follow, I humbly beg of you that you write it for me. For I do think that to lose Margaret would bring me swiftly to my own death, and then I would no longer be able to entertain Your Majesty with my follies and Jokes
.

I pray you are well, Sire, and not suffering in the great Age of Ice that has come upon our land
.

From your Faithful Subject, and Loyal Fool, Sir R. Merivel

Each day I prayed that the snow would melt, so that my letter could be conveyed to London, but no Thaw came. I began to believe that Margaret’s life hung upon this letter and that if I could keep her alive until the roads were passable once more, then she would not die, for some counsel would come from Whitehall to save her.

My medical books told me that there was no certain Remedy for Typhus. All I could discover was that the disease was wont to have a duration of eight or ten or twelve weeks, at which time the Patient would very likely display some sign of recovery, such as a marked lessening of the Fever and a Calmness in the Bowel. But if these signs did not come, why then, what would occur would be a growing Confusion of the Mind, followed by Unconsciousness and Death.

Both I and Margaret were thus in the hands of Fate, or (as my Parents, no less than John Pearce and the King himself would have insisted) in the hands of God. All that I, a mortal Doctor, was able to do was to relieve her symptoms a little. With Cattlebury’s broths I fed her Opium. I bled her from time to time, to try to calm the choler in her veins. I washed the sweat from her brow and from her body. On the Cancre I laid a smear of Louise’s Beeswax and Plantain salve and in a few days, to my great delight, the Cancre was reduced.

This small success with the Cancre cheered me for a while and I blessed Louise for its invention.

I spent much time talking. I reasoned that if I could keep Margaret’s mind alert, then I would stave off its gradual sinking into Unknowing. I told her the stories of her Childhood, beginning with that of her Birth, in the year of the Great Fire, and how it was I who, to save her life and her mother’s too, had cut her from Katharine’s womb.

She had heard this tale many times before: how that I had been convinced I would be able to save them both and failed. The first time I told her, she wept for her Mother and asked: ‘Why could you not save her, too, Papa?’

And I explained that no matter what I had tried, and what the Midwife had tried, we could not staunch the bleeding in Katharine’s womb, so her life drained away. But I reassured Margaret that her mother did not suffer, but only drifted into a beautiful sleep. And so died very calmly.

All of this was true, but Margaret had also grown up with one terrible lie concerning Katharine. She believed her to have been one of the Quaker Sisters helping Pearce and his Friends to care for the Mad People at the Whittlesea Bedlam. But it was not so. Though she was a beautiful and seductive woman, Katharine had been one of the Hospital’s most tortured inmates. Pearce had warned me, again and again, to keep my distance from her. But I had not kept it. Lust, once more, had led me to a fatal place where I should never have trespassed.

I had further told Margaret that her mother and I had married at the church of St Alphage, where Katharine is buried, but no such ceremony ever took place, for the simple reason that I, being still estranged from the King, was unable to procure any agreement to
the
Annulment of my marriage to Celia. And I was not prepared to commit Bigamy with Katharine.

Now, fearing that Margaret would die, I asked myself whether I did not owe her some Correction of the untruths surrounding her Mother’s short and fretful life.

I knew that I shrank from it. I told myself that it was not just to inflict such cruel revelations upon an invalid. But when I stared into the flames of the fire that was kept always burning in her room, I also imagined how, upon hearing of her Mother’s insanity and the lamentable advantage I took of this poor, helpless woman, Margaret would suddenly turn from me, her only living Parent, and wish I might be devoured in Hell.

The thought that, living or dying, my daughter would withdraw from me all her love was more than my exhausted mind could bear. So I stayed silent.

Walking, one frozen morning, about the house, to try to judge how the very building itself was withstanding the wrath of the snow and the winds, I went into the room I had always designated the Olive Room. It was no longer decorated in Olive greens (with scarlet tassels above the bed), but in a plaintive watery blue, which was much to the King’s liking but a little too insipid for my taste.

A great French Armoire, made of veneered Walnut, had always stood in this room and now I opened its doors, to draw into my lungs the scent of this cupboard, which was the Scent of the Past.

I stood there, breathing hard through my nose. I reminded myself of an animal sniffing the air, to see what sustenance or carnal delight it might find riding on the wind; or a Connoisseur of Wine, snorting into his goblet, pretending to smell Blackberries and Wood of Elm and I know not what else in a beaker of Claret.

What I could smell was my youth. A memory of its Delectation filled my veins and warmed me. In this very room had I lain with Violet Bathurst, and torn at her clothes and been made weak by her shameless demands. In this same place had Will and I nursed Pearce for thirty-seven hours. On this spot had I held baby Margaret in my arms, to show her each room of the house that had been restored to me in 1668 and would one day be hers.

My young self, I recalled, was always in a lather of Heat. So explosive with Plans and Mad Wonders had it been, that I could recall no wintertime – except one – when it had felt cold. And I was just beginning to marvel at this when I noticed a large bundle, wrapped in Linen, at the bottom of the Armoire. And I remembered what it contained.

I lifted it up and set it down, and spread out the Linen wrapping, and there before me lay a great heap of Badger Furs. They had been fashioned into Tabards by my Tailor, old Trench, in the Winter of 1665, which, I now remembered, had been of long and icy duration, and in the course of which I, no less than the next man, had begun to shiver.

I had insisted that all my household servants follow my own example by wearing these Badger skins, ‘to prevent chills and Agues’. I had warned them that we would, every one of us, appear a trifle foolish, draped in these singular Garments (with the snout of a dead Badger rearing up on each shoulder), but that upon them might depend our survival of the cold. ‘Of what account is mere foolishness,’ I asked them, ‘compared to Death?’

All had agreed to wear the furs. All except Will.

Will had turned aside from me and would not, under any threat of Punishment whatsoever, put on his Tabard. I had endeavoured to coax and cajole him. I had warned him he might suffer from all manner of ailments if he did not keep his body warm in this way, but he utterly disregarded me.

‘I shall not, Sir Robert,’ he informed me, ‘and that is that.’

Now the Tabards were a little mangy with Moth holes, and spiced with the Dust of Time, and the snouts no longer reared up, but hung down somewhat mournfully, and many of the glass eyes, sewn in by Trench, had fallen out. However, when I shook out the garments I could feel that there was still much warmth in them. And so it came to me that I would brush them down and wash and dry them, as carefully as I tended my wig, and lay some of them upon Margaret’s bed. Reserving one for myself, I would distribute the others among the servants. ‘Pay no attention to the Moth holes,’ I would say, ‘but only consider the heat they will bring to the area of your hearts.’