Restoration (23 page)

At this inconclusive (and somewhat incoherent) point, my scribbles to Rosie were interrupted. Will Gates came up to my room and informed me that Mister de Gourlay had arrived and urgently requested to see me.

"Look at me, Will," I said. "I can see no one until I am well again."

"He asks me to tell you that he has brought with him something to make you well."

"Ah," I said, "the blood of swallows, perhaps."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"I would prefer to remain alone, Will. I have much to think about."

"He is very pressing, Sir."

"There's the reason he is not popular. He has not grasped that life is a quadrille, necessitating backward as well as forward
pas
."

Upon saying this, I immediately reflected that my apology to Celia was one such backward
pas
, without which I would not be able to resume any dance whatsoever, unless perhaps a Dance of Death. Thus, while Will was further pressing Dégeulasse's suit, I quickly laid aside my letter (if such it was) to Rosie Pierpoint, took up a clean sheet of vellum and wrote the following simple message:

I then instructed Will to bring Dégeulasse to my room and, having done so, to deliver my short note to Celia.

I put on my wig. The anxiety within me had lessened by a small measure, seeming to cause a sudden drop in the temperature of my blood. Whereas I had been boiling and burning, I now felt chill. I reached for my tabard and put it on and sat with my arms tucked under its apron. What, I wished to enquire, as I waited for my guest, had happened to my painting of Russians? Was it ever begun anywhere but in my mind?

Dégeulasse's arrival interrupted me before I could find an answer to this. The sight of him relieved me of worry about my appearance. He is one of those people who is most horribly and voluptuously ugly, but whose ugliness one seems to forget the moment he leaves one's sight, only to remember it more forcibly again the next time one lays eyes upon him. (I do find myself wondering whether he appears thus to his wife and children, so that his family like him most when he is not with them.)

To compound the fleshy grossness of his features, Dégeulasse has upon his left cheek a very virulent psora he is in the habit of trying to conceal with his hand. It pains me to see him do this. There must be some remedy, I found myself thinking, but of course I had forgotten what it was. It was he, at all events, who had come to play the role of physician, not I. He appeared honestly concerned that "since the night of your intended party, it is reported you are not much yourself" and proceeded to put before me a bottle containing some green cordial. "Got from a mountebank, a regular quack!" he announced. "Not worth the threepence charged!"

"Ah," I said. "Then why do you bring it to me, Mister de Gourlay?"

"Because it is the most efficacious cure for melancholy that has ever been distilled."

"And yet you said it was not worth the small sum you expended…"

"So I did! And which do you believe, Sir Robert? Is it valueless or is it beyond price?"

"I believe neither…"

"Very wise."

"Until I have taken some…"

"Precisely. Thus, you have invested it with no expectation? You are neutral?"

"Yes."

"You believe in equal measure that its properties are worthless and that it may also work a wonderous cure?"

"I believe less in the cure."

"Yet you admit it to be a possibility?"

"Yes."

"Excellent. And you will promise to take some before sleeping?"

"I will."

"Perfect."

De Gourlay sat down. He was beaming. I have noticed this about human beings: secret knowledge makes them smile. It is the smile of power. It is invariably irritating but, on this occasion, I found myself intrigued that Dégeulasse was playing a little game with me. I was wondering what, precisely, the game was about, when Dégeulasse gave his large belly a comradely slap and declared: "Expectation, you see! Reason's whore! And there she clings round all our necks,
n'est-ce pas?"

"You may be right."

"I am right. Consider your soirée, so lately cancelled. I cannot describe to you with what expectation of happiness and lasting consequence my wife and daughters had invested it, I cannot describe to you!"

"I am sorry…"

"No, no. Do not apologise. No one had informed my wife that great and influential men from Court would be there, who would, in the space of that one evening, advance our fortunes by three thousand livres per annum. No one had promised my daughters that at your table they would meet the sons of Marquises or young nephews of Prince Rupert. And yet this is what they expected of it! And when informed the party was cancelled, do you know what they did, all three of them? They fell to weeping!"

"Well," I said, "I regret that no eminences from Court or kindred of Rupert had agreed to come to it."

"As I did not believe they would, or at least, I did and did not believe they would in precisely equal measure and so stored up for myself no hope whatsoever."

"Most wise, I would venture."

"Precisely. Now do feel at your ease to confide in me what has happened to you, if it pleases you to do so. I am a man of absolutely no wisdom at all. Then again, my mother believes me to be one of the most clever people ever to reside in Norfolk."

Dégeulasse laughed heartily. This was the first time I had heard laughter in very many days and it reverberated in the room most curiously, like an echo or like a sound coming from under water. Then it ceased and there was silence, and, in the silence, my gaze fixed upon the crusty, enflamed skin of de Gourlay's cheek, the remedy for the psora returned to me and I said: "Alas I do not
know
what has happened to me. Thus, I can confide in no one. On the other hand, I know what will cure the suppurations on your face."

"No!" said Dégeulasse quickly. "Do not say you know! Say you know and yet you do not know."

"Very well. There are two remedies. Either of these will help the infection, or neither will help it at all. The first is plantain water mixed with a little loose sugar; the second is a treacle posset. These will or will not cure you."

De Gourlay thanked me and laughed again and seemed impatient for me to join in the laughter. But I could not. Now I saw that, by believing in the cleverness and wisdom of his own game, he was in fact rendering himself rather foolish. For what was the game but another self-deception: by juggling negatives and positives he expected to be able to protect himself from pain, yet it was clear to me that he craved as much from life as any man. For what was the insertion of the "de" into his surname but a declaration of hope?

Night seemed to have come by the time de Gourlay left my room. Though I had put a taper to my fire, I felt distressingly cold. A bath, I decided, was the only thing that would warm me.

I called for Will. He informed me that he had delivered my note to Celia.

"How is my wife?" I asked him.

"Listless, Sir. Impatient for the return of Mister Finn, so that the portrait may be finished."

"Finn has left?"

"Yes, Sir. The day after your cancelled party. On Whitehall business, he boasted."

So, I was not wrong. Finn had been appointed (or had made himself) the King's spy.

As I sat in my tub (my head lolling and somewhat uncomfortable, so that it occurred to me to design a chin-strap for myself such as I had imagined for the people of the River Mar) I tried to determine what consequences this spying would have for me. Knowing the King as I did, supreme as he is in his power over every person living in his Kingdom, I was prepared to wager that he would be amused by the folly of my love for Celia. "Well, Merivel…" I could hear him say, "what a clumsy, impersonation of Romeo you do make! Tussling with Juliet upon the balcony! In future, do try to remember which role has been given to you. You are Paris." I smiled. So perfectly could I remember the inflections of the King's voice that I could almost believe him to be present in the room, just beyond the steam rising from my bath-water.

I closed my eyes. Will was ladling hot water over my shoulders and stomach, yet I was starting to feel cold again and it was the coldness of a fever. "Bring more water, Will," I instructed, "and let it be piping hot."

"This is hot enough, Sir. You will vaporise."

"Do not argue. Go, heat more water. I am drowning in cold."

I was left alone, then, in my tub. Outside the window, I heard the shrieking of a nightjar. I thought of Nell's prediction of my fall. I thought of Pierpoint's fall from his boat. And of Rosie, alone in her laundry, waiting for thirty shillings to fall into her palm.

I remember that Will half carried me, dripping and trembling from the bath. He dried me and put over my head a clean nightshirt and lay me down in my bed and I instructed him to pile furs upon me and I could smell the badger skins; they smelled of earth.

I burrowed down. I burrowed into sleep. And when I woke in the middle of the night, I knew that I was most horribly ill, with a pain in my forehead and at the base of my skull such as I had never imagined, unless it were the pain of death itself.

I vomited copiously into a basin. The sounds of my retching woke Will, who had laid himself to sleep on the floor of my bedchamber. He took the basin away and brought me water. "Sir," he said, holding the cup to my mouth, "I see some red patches or blotches upon your face."

I lay back, the pain in my head causing me to whimper like Celia's neglected Isabelle. Will held a mirror to my nose. I squinted at myself. It was an afflicting sight, one that I may long remember. I had contracted the measles.

I will not describe for you the discomfort of this illness. It will suffice to set down that I was very vexed with pain for several days, a pain relieved only by the frequent doses of laudanum which I prescribed for myself and which, in turn, sent my brain into a kind of delirium so that I no longer recognised my room, nor Will within it, but believed myself to be, variously, at Whitehall, in my parents' workshop, in Wise Nell's stinking parlour and on a tilt boat.

When the pain at last lessened and I was able to lie still without groaning, I knew that what was now stealing upon me was a sleep so profound it was like a swaddling of death. It held me for some fifteen or sixteen hours at a time. Then I would wake and find Will or Cattlebury at my side with a little cup of broth, which I would try to sip. Then I would piss feebly into my pot and lie down again and in minutes re-enter this velvet sleep, at one moment remarking to myself that, if it resembled death, it also resembled infancy and musing foolishly on the possibility of being reborn in a more handsome and serious guise.

This, of course, did not come about. I was "reborn" two weeks later, weak as a mole and covered with scabs. I sat up and saw Will sitting in a chair, wearing his tabard. "Thank you, Will," I said. "And for caring for me so well. Without you, I would have been in a sorry mess."

"Are you better, Sir?"

"I believe I am. Though I feel somewhat puny and hollow…"

"Are you recovered enough for some news?"

"News?"

"Yes. About your household."

"Meaning you and Cattlebury and the other servants?"

"No, Sir. Meaning your wife and her maid and Mister Finn and the music master. They are all gone. Gone to London."

"Celia has gone?"

"Yes, Sir Robert. And taken all her dresses and fans and so forth."

"But the portrait…"

"Finished. And the day it was, the King sends one of the Royal coaches, and they all get into it and are gone."

I lay down again. I stared at my turquoise canopy. "That is the end of it, then," I heard myself say. "Now, she will never return. What date is it, Will?"

"February, Sir. The twenty-second day."

One week later, as I sat by my fire, staring vacantly into the flames, Will brought me a letter. It was, as I knew it would be, from the King. Or rather, it was not
from
him but from one of his secretaries and set out the following summons:

"So," I said to Will, who had brought me the note, "Finn did his work."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"Never mind. The King calls me to London, Will. And it will not be to praise me."

"You're too weak, yet, to go to London, Sir."

"Needs must, Will. I shall not ride, but take the coach. Perhaps you would be good enough to accompany me?"

"Willingly, Sir Robert."

"We shall leave tomorrow morning, then. Make sure my black and gold coat is clean and my gold breeches."

"Yes, Sir."

"And fold up the tabard I had intended my wife should wear. We shall take it to the King as a present. Though I fear – "

"What, Sir?"

"That no offering of this kind will be enough."

I shall not dwell upon the details of our journey, except to record that, as we came to Mile End and Will saw in the distance the tower and turrets of London, he grew most childishly excited thinking of the marvels he was about to witness for the first time, he having passed all thirty-nine years of his life in Norfolk. And when it dawned upon his Norfolk mind that he might, in all probability, set eyes upon the King in his palace, he began to blub, thus causing me in the space of five minutes more delight than I had experienced in as many weeks. (I have grown, in my time at Bidnold, most fond of Will Gates. If he is now to be taken from me for ever, I will remember him often.)