Restoration (29 page)

That night (and all the month of nights since the first one), we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, ate a supper of fish, vegetables and bread cooked by Daniel in the kitchen and we spoke of our day which, to me, had been worse than any day I had spent dissecting cadavers at Padua or tending the poor sick of St Thomas's.

In the middle of this supper, I heard outside a wounding, familiar noise: it was the whinny of Danseuse. And of course I was once again tempted, then and there as I tried to swallow some greasy mackerel, to saddle my mare and ride away. But I did not. And Pearce had his eye upon me and seemed to know my thoughts. "Robert," he said kindly, "when you join us in our Meeting in our parlour, try to cast from your mind all old longings, so that you may be filled with the words of Christ and, through Him, speak to us."

"Yes, John," I said. "I will try."

Before the Meetings, the six Keepers (and now I, the seventh) take up lamps and go round the three madhouses being "tender". Our behaviour each night reminds me of King Harry's before Agincourt, except that we are not exhorting the lunatics to fight courageously on the morrow, but to still their souls in preparation for sleep. We inform them that Christ is in them ("as surely," I heard Pearce say, "as if He were the very blood that moves in a circle out from your heart and to it again") and is therefore keeping all safe during the night.

The straw beds are then laid out and the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell lie down upon them and cover their bodies, each with his grey blanket. And then we say a prayer over them and bid them goodnight and take the lamps away and they are left in their rows in the darkness. But the men and women of William Harvey are seldom quietened by our "tenderness", some not recognising night from day and seeming to have no knowledge of what sleep is until it overtakes them. And from my room, which is an exceedingly small place somewhat resembling my linen cupboard at Bidnold, I can often hear crying and howling coming from WH.

During the night, what is called a "Night Keeping" is made at two o'clock by two of the Friends together and we take it in turns to undertake this task, for which we must rise from our beds in the darkness and go in to each of the houses and make sure that none of the mad people is hurt or ill or trying some foul deed upon another. I dread the nights when I must take part in a Night Keeping. I dread most particularly the sight of Katharine sitting up and making rags of her clothes. I have made up some ointment of saffron and orris and I smoothe this upon her temples, but as yet it has had no effect on her. It is always past three before I can return to my bed (there being always some malady to attend to or some comfort to give) and then I find myself so truly woken up by what I have had to do that I cannot return to sleep. And it is always at this hour that thoughts of Celia come into my mind. And I find myself wondering, does she still use my name and call herself Lady Merivel? Is Lady Merivel sleeping at this hour, or is she – as I imagine – singing to guests in her lighted rooms at Kew?

On my arrival here at Whittlesea, I made some attempt to justify my love for Celia to Pearce, describing it as a generous love, a love which was "useful", as the King would have it. He did not agree. He told me I was deluding myself. "It was an intemperate love," he said and, quoting Plato, informed me that "the intemperance of love is a disease of the soul," words which I have written down on a piece of parchment and wrapped around my oboe and put inside the sea chest I have been given in which I keep my wordly goods.

For reasons which are not yet clear to me, my mind seems to enjoy its greatest repose during the Friends' Meetings. I am quite silent within them. In the month that has passed, I have not been moved – by God or any other voice within me – to say anything at all. And sometimes very little is said by anyone and all we do is to sit in a semi-circle by the parlour fire.

It is most odd that I should even tolerate, let alone draw strength from such prolonged bouts of silence. At first, I was most restless at Meetings and impatient for them to be ended and felt my thoughts flying away from the room to lost places. One evening, Ambrose passed to me a piece of paper and asked me to read the words written on it and these were they: "Be quiet, that you may come to the summer, that your flight be not in the winter. For if you sit still in the patience which overcomes in the power of God, there will be no flying." And from that moment, I truly tried to be quiet and not to loathe but to love quietness, and so I began to fare better at the Meetings and at last to feel myself revived a little by the affectionate presence of John, Ambrose, Edmund, Hannah, Eleanor and Daniel.

And when they speak, prefacing even the most ordinary observations by "It has come to me from the Lord," I find myself very touched by what they have to say, so that I want to laugh. And this feeling of suppressed laughter is the nearest I have come for a long time to happiness.

I always wear my wig for Meetings so as to spare John and the others the sight of my hogs' bristles. There is a tidiness about the way they arrange the chairs that I don't wish to spoil. With the wig on, however, and with one of my coats (usually the black and gold, not the red) replacing the leather tabard, I resemble very nearly the Merivel of my former life and invisible under this old finery is the Robert of now. He is present, nevertheless. He is grateful for the warmth of the parlour fire and for the voices of Hannah and Eleanor which are so gentle and soothing that, when one of them is speaking, he sometimes finds himself asleep in his chair. But the one great trouble about Quakers is that they are bossy: they do not let you dream.

The winds have gone and the air of April is still and quiet and warm. In the Airing Court, the big oak is putting out leaves of a green so succulent it brings saliva into my mouth. I do not precisely wish to eat these leaves but yet want to posses them in some way before the newness of them vanishes.

It has not rained here for some time and through the yellow crust on the mud of Whittlesea new grass is springing up and in the ditch outside the wall there are primroses and violets. Pearce seems most entranced by these flowers, as if he had never seen nor smelled any like them before. Not only does he pick them and examine them; I have observed him lie down on the edge of the ditch and stick his nose into a clump of primroses and not move for ten minutes at a time. I know from the vacant look in his blue eyes that his mind is at work on some experiment with regard to the flowers, but I have not asked him what it might be lest he infer from my interest in the thing a renewal of a more profound interest in biology.

Hannah and Eleanor are in the habit of thanking the Lord for giving us "kind weather", but I have come to the conclusion that to me such a springtime is cruel; in it I feel wanton and idle. I would prefer a return to hard skies and a clamped chill, these being a better accompaniment to the routine of my day, which is a most harsh one that affords me no leisure at all, but rather commits me to many hours of work of the most demanding kind I could imagine, namely work with my scalpel.

There is, adjacent to each of the main rooms of George Fox, Margaret Fell and William Harvey, a small ante-room, lit with oil lamps, in which patients are examined and cures and operations tried upon them. Before my arrival, Pearce and Ambrose were the only two physicians among the Keepers at Whittlesea and so to them fell the task of trying to alleviate madness with the knife. Now, I have been forced by Pearce to "render service to Whittlesea by placing such skill as you possess in the service of the common good", or in other words to join in the cutting and blood letting and to do it without complaint, for Pearce's eye is always upon me, watching and measuring. He knows very well how I recoil before this return to my former vocation. He knows also that were he and the other Friends to put me out from here, I would be at a loss to know in which to direction to ride.

Mercifully, I have not yet been required to perform any large operations, but there is, by those who study insanity, a great faith put in phlebotomy, and this we undertake daily. The degree of suffering felt by a man who must have his head held over a bowl while a scalpel opens a vein in his temple I cannot calculate, but if I am the one who must make the incision I always feel obliged to apologise to him beforehand, and often feel tempted to add (yet do not): "Forgive me, for I know not what I do," for since coming to Whittlesea I have seen not one cure worked by a phlebotomy. As well as from the forehead, we let blood from the cephalic vein and many patients bear in their arms wounds that have been reopened so many times they will not close. Ambrose says of the cephalic phlebotomies: "In the bright blood let by this means, I can
smell
the choler!" His faith in medical science is no less complete than his faith in Christ and with regard to both practices I know him to be an honest and honourable man. But I can perceive no miracle cure in the opening of the cephalic vein. Invariably, the patients (even those who are violent) are quiet for some hours after the cutting, but soon enough return to their habitual state, the pain of their wounds surely adding to their other sufferings? In short, I am somewhat critical of the methods we employ here. We spill blood and with its flow believe we release poisonous humours, but do not know beyond all question whether we do or not. I remain silent, however. For it can avail me nought (do you note the biblical cadences into which my language has fallen?) to condemn a thing when I have nothing better to put in its place.

I have noticed, however, that there is one shortcoming in our modes of treatment, which are based upon the unspoken thesis that lunacy is a liquid thing, which may, drop by drop, or in a sudden heaving torment, be coaxed out of the body in streams of blood, vomit or faeces. I do not know whether or not lunacy is a liquid thing but, were it to be so, I would try natural as well as unnatural means of bringing about the body's excretions. And this we do not do. I would cause the lunatics to weep (either with laughter or with sadness, it would not matter) and I would cause them to sweat. For the first, I would tell stories; for the second, I would play music and let them dance. Yet neither tears nor perspiration are encouraged. With those who do cry we are stern, telling them to cease their wailing and remember Jesus who never wept for himself, only for the sufferings of others. And of course there is no dancing. The only exercise taken by the inmates of our Hospital is the passing of the shuttle through the warp of the loom, the turning of the spinning wheels and the slow shuffling round the Airing Court. And this overlooking of two beneficial evacuations of nature has begun to worry me, so that it keeps bobbing to the surface of my mind. It bobs up, in truth, so frequently and persistently that I may soon be forced to disturb Pearce's reverie with his primroses by revealing to him my thoughts upon the subject.

Word that I was once at Court has reached the inmates of William Harvey. How it has traveled there I do not know, unless the hand of the King may still be felt in the ice of the scalpel blade. As Pearce has stated, most of those in WH have no remembrance of the word "Court", nor could imagine what manner of thing a Court might be. But there is one, calling himself Piebald, a mutineer on the
Valiant Queen
, who now takes great delight in telling me that all men on earth with a rank above midshipman are bringers of pox and pestilence and suffering, and should be slain – as he single-handedly slew three officers – "to rid this England of the stink of privilege". Because I was once a "Court Prick", he includes me among those he wishes to kill, and each week he devises a new means of death for me, death and violence being all that occupy his mind, day and night.

And at night, alone in my linen cupboard, I can sometimes feel mortally afraid of this Piebald. Yet quite often during the day I find myself lingering in his pen, his ways of death being so ingenious that I find solace in them for my imagination. That I do this is, of course, most strange. Yet I find myself wondering, do many men of a cowardly disposition not secretly long to meet face to face that other who, without fuss or deliberation, will instantly take their lives from them? Is it uncommon to feel glad to have found him?

This evening, after the Meeting, I took up a piece of parchment to my room and wrote in a pretty script these blasphemous words.

On the morning of the twenty-first of April, finding myself once again staying awhile in WH to listen to Piebald, then noticing, on emerging from the place, that Pearce was walking across the Airing Court holding a bunch of kingcups to his nose, I came suddenly to the conclusion that we two might ourselves be going mad and that it would be possible to recognise in our behaviours – mine with Piebald, Pearce's with the flowers – the first footsteps of our madness. And no sooner had I addressed this possibility than I came stumbling upon a truth about the fate of the insane which had hitherto remained hidden not only from me but I believe from all the Keepers at Whittlesea. And it is this:

Though it was almost dinnertime and the smell of broth in the kitchen brought on a little pain of hunger, I forced myself to go to my room and lie down upon my narrow bed and look very squarely at my supposed truth, following Fabricius's motto: "Let certainty be tempered with disbelief." And I imagined the great anatomist's gaze upon me.