Merivel A Man of His Time (26 page)

Rain began falling. My emptied gut cried out in pain. But still we trudged on, down green lanes, and over wide meadows and fields of corn and apple orchards and pig pens and scrubland covered with Gorse.

By a circuitous route, and without the least sighting or sniffing of Clarendon, we arrived at Bidnold Village, where a tavern I knew very well, the Jovial Rushcutters, was just opening its doors, and I said to the men, ‘Let us go in and I will buy us a good drench of Ale to fortify us. Then we shall go on.’

They did not refuse. We sat on benches among the Sawdust, quaffing beer, and never has any Ale tasted as fine to me, and my poor stomach was much calmed by it. After drinking two jugs of it I would willingly have lain down on one of the Rushcutters’ hard settles and slept, but I knew that I had to keep to my word. I paid for the beer and we went out again into the bleak morning.

The rain kept up its steady fall. It was one of those summer rains, invisible almost, yet soon enough dampening your clothes and your spirits. And I was so tired, after several hours of walking, that I was
ready
to drop down in a field of clover and let Clarendon find me and bite out my heart.

In this field was a barn, where the first of the summer hay was piled up in great mounds. And as soon as we came near to this barn I knew that this was where we would find the Bear. I could see his paw prints in the clover, leading there, and then I caught his scent on the breeze, in spite of the rain.

I halted the posse of men. I told Patchett to make ready his Blunderbuss.

I said: ‘He is in there. Go slowly and he will not come at you. Aim at his head or at his heart.’

The farmers all hoisted their pitchforks and their shovels, and Patchett got his great gun primed for its firing. Then they walked forward in a Column, the pitchfork men keeping safely behind Patchett.

I stood in the clover. I waited to hear the explosion of the Blunderbuss and, when it came, I felt a kind of deliverance come upon me, as though all my duties to the World – at which I failed so ruinously often – had been taken away and nothing more would ever be asked of me.

20

I TOLD PATCHETT
and the other men that I wished to bury Clarendon and asked them to help me to dig a pit. They regarded me as though I were a lunatic.

‘Forgive me, Sir Robert,’ said Patchett, ‘but look at the Meat on him! Enough for ten families. In my house we have not eaten Meat since springtime.’

The Blunderbuss had shot Clarendon near the heart, laying open the bloody sinews of his chest and dislocating his left arm, but his head had not been touched and it lay on the mound of sweet grass as though on a pillow. One eye was open and one closed. The open eye oozed blackness and I did not know what this was, whether black tears or some discharge of his brain, dribbling through the skull.

All is perplexity, thought I.

‘Bear Meat will be strong …’ I said feebly to the farmers. ‘The taste of it will not be to savour.’

‘We can bear strong Meat,’ said Patchett. ‘Never you trouble yourself about that. You go home, Sir Robert, and we will skin him and portion him up between us and have a fine Roasting tonight. We can bring you the Pelt, if you wish it, but the Meat is ours: a fair exchange for the slaughtered Ewe.’

I could not argue with this logic, though the thought of Clarendon being eaten made me sad for the world: for its pitiless Arrangements. I said I would accept the Pelt, wanting, I suppose, to possess something of my Bear, even though the animal was dead. I thought that a Norfolk Tanner might make of it some great Rug, which, when
the
dark winter came again, I could lay upon my bed and feel it, warm and heavy on me, in my loneliness.

I made my way back to Bidnold, going slowly through the orchards and the fields of clover, as the rain ceased and a bright morning sun began to beat upon my skull.

As I walked it came upon me that, tired though I was, I had an urgent task to perform and this was to send a letter to Louise de Flamanville, asking to be taken in by her, into her Father’s house in Switzerland.

This escape – to her and her only – I now saw as the thing for which I suddenly longed beyond all longing. I yearned to be transported there on the wings of some mythical Bird, without the glittering fatigue of a sea journey and the slow travail of coaches and the discomfort of wayside Inns. For, with Margaret gone into the King’s clutches and my poor Clarendon dead, my weariness with Bidnold and with all of England was suddenly so great that I could not conceive how I was going to endure the next twenty-four hours in it, unless with a return to the taking of Laudanum.

As I approached the house I saw a strange Conveyance, like a small canvas-covered wagon, drawn up at my front door. I at once assumed that some gypsy pedlar had come a-calling and prepared my strongest and least compassionate voice with which to send him packing on his life of scavenge and barter. But Will, seeing me come staggering home at last, tottered out into the drive to tell me that a gentleman, ‘a Quaker by the garb of him, but with a name I could not catch, is here to see you, Sir Robert’.

‘Oh, Will,’ I said, ‘I have walked round half of Norfolk and got wet through, and now I have been sweating in the sun and my poor Bear is dead. I swear I cannot do anything more today but lie down …’

‘I understand that, Sir,’ said Will, helping to remove from my aching shoulders my saturated cloak, ‘and I am sorry about your Bear, but the Quaker Person is very intent upon seeing you and I think you should converse with him, for that he says he was a friend of Mr Pearce.’

This last statement caught my attention, as Will knew it would. I was immediately intent on talking to the man. Telling Will to send to
Cattlebury
for Lardy cake and boiled Chocolate, I dragged myself to my close-stool, where I pissed away the ale drunk at the Jovial Rushcutters, then changed my clothes, put on my wig and descended to the Withdrawing Room, where I expected to find my visitor.

There was, however, no sign of him. I called for Will, who explained to me in a whisper that ‘this man, being a Quaker, Sir, I thought the splendour of the Withdrawing Room too great for him to bear – as it always was for Mr Pearce – so I put him in the Library. By the way, Sir Robert, your wig is all awry.’

‘No matter!’ I snapped at Will. ‘Let me just come to the Quaker and see what he wants, and then I shall go to my room. I must write to Switzerland. Please make sure I have ink and quills and paper. I will take my Luncheon on a tray.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ said Will. ‘And would you like me to interrupt you with an urgent Message?’

‘What are you talking about, Will? What Message?’

‘Would you like me to come into the Library, Sir, with some supposed Important Communication, so that you may make your escape from the Quaker and he be forced to leave, so that you may write your urgent letter?’

I looked down at Will’s creased and trusting face. He is like some little animal, I thought, whose sinews I must preserve, at all costs, from the destruction of the Blunderbuss.

‘Yes, Will,’ I said kindly. ‘Now I understand you. That is a capital idea. Come in in ten minutes. Say that a Messenger from the King has arrived unexpectedly.’

‘I will, Sir Robert. Unexpectedly.’

I entered the Library and there found a tall, gaunt figure, dressed in the black Quaker Garb so familiar to me. The man had taken off his hat (a thing which Quakers do not normally like to do, for fear of conceding any mark of Respect to any individual including the King himself) and the hair on his head was white. He had a small beard, also white, yet of a russet colour at its end, as though it had been singed.

He came towards me and held out his hand. His eye, still lively in his worn face, lit up with obvious emotion. ‘Robert,’ he said.

And in this saying of my first name he revealed himself to me.
Only
a few people in my life have ever addressed me as ‘Robert’: my dear dead parents, John Pearce, and his Quaker Friends at the Whittlesea Bedlam, where I worked before Margaret was born. And this man was Ambrose, one of those same Quakers, a person of very kindly disposition who, after Pearce’s death and my seduction of Katharine, had to perform the terrible task of sending me away. This sending away he had managed to do with great tenderness and sorrow, so that I did not, in any guise at any moment in my life, blame him for it. I was at fault; he performed his duty and that was that. Katharine and I were driven away in a Dray Cart.

‘Ambrose,’ I said, seizing his hand. ‘Oh, what a goodly day that we meet again!’

He nodded. It appeared that the sight of me, older by some seventeen years than when he had at last seen me and with the sorrows of the morning still visible, perhaps, on my features, had choked him, so that he could not speak.

‘I have ordered Cake and Chocolate,’ I said. ‘Come, Ambrose, and sit by the window, where you will have a nice view of my park, and we shall talk of former times.’

Ambrose produced a ragged handkerchief from one of his black pockets and wiped his eyes. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘Think nothing of it. I am forever weeping. But tell me at once, dear Ambrose, what became of your Bedlam? Ten years ago I drove there with my daughter, for I wanted you all to meet her, and she you. But the place was abandoned and in ruins.’

‘It is sad that you saw it so.’

‘I went to John Pearce’s grave and got some briars and brambles away, for that they offended me. I saw the remnants of the barns, where our Inmates had had their existence, but the wind sighed through all. I believe you were long gone.’

Ambrose was now seated in a chair. He placed his hands under his chin in a familiar, characteristic steeple position and looked away from me, out towards the summer morning.

‘I can hardly bear to tell you, Robert,’ he said. ‘We depended, for all our needs, upon Quaker Charity. And as the years went on, it seems the Spirit of Charity diminished in England, with everyone
getting
and grabbing for himself. We became very poor and could take no more Distressed People into our care.

‘We could barely feed those we had, nor feed ourselves. We had to resort to getting wild food. Daniel went out each morning to net larks, as they rise up with their song. We ate ground acorns and grass soaked in milk …’

At this moment one of my immaculately liveried Footmen came into the Library and laid down a jug of steaming Chocolate and some large slices of Lardy Cake.

Ambrose ceased talking and stared at the beverage and the Cake as though they might have been a box of jewels, and seemed to lose the thread of his discourse, so great was his wonderment.

I instructed the Footman to serve the Cake and Chocolate to my guest, and only when Ambrose had consumed a large morsel of cake and taken a deep draught of the Chocolate did he go on with his story.

He told me how, for a year or more, the Quaker Keepers and the Inmates had subsisted ‘on wild birds and the little root vegetables we could grow’, but the truth was that they were starving.

Eventually they had to summon the Inmates – those who had survived the hunger – to a meeting and tell them that the Whittlesea Bedlam would close its doors before the next winter. ‘This was harsh news,’ said Ambrose, ‘and every one of them stood helplessly gaping at us, for we had been their protectors and they thought our Protection would go on for ever, but it could not.’

The Quakers helped the Distressed People to write letters to their families, asking to be taken home once more. ‘But there were three men and two women,’ said Ambrose, ‘who had no families, or could not remember having any, or whose families refused to take them, so what were we to do with these?’

‘I know not, Ambrose …’

‘We asked the Workhouse at Marsh to accommodate them, but they would not.’

‘For that they could
work
?’

‘They could not. And we were almost resolved, as our last and desperate Resort, to send them out into the lanes to beg. But it was Daniel who saved us from this and found them shelter.’

‘Sweet Daniel. He was but a boy when I was at Whittlesea. Tell me where he found it?’

‘In Cambridge. He knew a man who presented a Spectacle of Performing Animals: elephants, dogs and one Tiger from India. And he went to this Showman and stood before him and said: “We can help you add to your Spectacle, and so charge a higher fee for entry. We can give you five Lunatics. And they will screech and tear their clothes and perform any Lunatic action you ask of them to entertain the crowd. And they will demand no recompense, only food and lodging …”’

‘Ah. I see Daniel’s resourcefulness, and yet …’

‘I know what you are thinking – that they would be degraded and seem no better than bears in the minds of the spectators.’

‘Well …’

‘You are right, of course. And so it proved, for they were put in a Cage to make the Crowd more affrighted by them, and when I heard about this Cage, I felt mightily sad. But if the Showman had not taken them, Robert, they would have died. Which would you have us procure for them, death or Degradation?’

I was silent, unable to answer this on the instant. I took some Chocolate into me and was glad of its warmth and sweetness.

Ambrose, pausing in his tale, looked at me pleadingly. ‘I beg you, Robert, do not blame us. We could not help them to live another
day
. We ourselves were so weak and thin and suffering from every Ailment that we could hardly perform our tasks or conduct our prayers, and I do not exaggerate when I say this. The Showman saved five lives.’

‘Caged lives,’ I said.

‘Alas …’

‘Yet I do not blame you, Ambrose,’ I added quickly. ‘I understand that you had tried every other avenue. When famine visits, desperate measures may be required.’

I was about to embark upon a vain little disquisition on the subject of knowing something of Hunger myself, at the Court of Versailles but, recognising – just in time to stop myself from uttering it – that what I had suffered was as naught to what the Quakers and their charges had endured, I merely asked: ‘And when the Inmates had all
departed,
where did you go, Ambrose? Where did Daniel go, and Hannah and Eleanor?’