Restoration (33 page)

"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 filled 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:

I folded this letter after I had read it once and stowed it away in the sea chest, thus hoping to put it out of my mind, for I do not deny it made me feel sad. Pearce, as it chanced, came seeking me on some errand just as I was putting the thing away and saw at once (for nothing that I feel can I seem to conceal from him) that some portion of my past was once again preoccupying my mind, which should have dwelled only and entirely on my great Cure by Dancing that was to be tried the next day. He stood at the door and regarded me and without asking me what my letter had contained, he said, in his sternest voice: "I presume you are familiar with the Act of Praemunire, Robert?"

"No," I replied, "I am not, John."

"Let me enlighten you then. The Act of Praemunire permits the confiscation – immediate and without redress, upon the presentation of a warrant of Praemunire – of property, goods and chattels as a punishment for Non-Conformity. Hundreds of Quakers have lost their houses and their land under the terms of this loathsome edict. The suffering caused by it has been beyond what you could imagine. So do not believe you are singled out, Robert. You are merely one of many. The King has behaved towards you as towards a Quaker, and this is all."