Restoration (41 page)

I paid five guineas to an old apothecary I had known during my time at Ludgate. For this sum, he made up a large quantity of the medicine (it tasted quite pleasant, being infused in Malaga Wine) and sold me a gross of bottles. Hanging on the door of his shop, I noticed one of the strange, bird-like headdresses worn by doctors going into plague houses and I asked him whether I might borrow this from him. "You may keep it, Sir," he said, "for that doctor comes here no more, nor goes anywhere, nor has breath."

I took it down and put it on. It is made of leather and covers the head and face and shoulders entirely. In it are set two eye-pieces made of glass and a long beak through which one is able to breathe with difficulty, it being stuffed with sachets
of potpourri
, put there to protect the wearer from the corrupted air. With the headdress goes a leather mantle (not unlike the tabards we used to wear at Whittlesea) and thick leather gloves that reach to the elbows. Once inside these garments, I knew that whoever I have now become – whether Robert or Merivel or neither of these or a composite of the two – I had rendered myself completely unrecognisable, even to those who knew me well. I did not even look like a man, but like a duck, and I thought how fitting this was, for in peddling Pearce's prophylactic, the efficacy of which had never been proven, I was about to become no better than a quacksalver.

This realisation, though it dismayed me for a while, did not prevent me, as I walked back to Cheapside wearing my duck garb, from feeling an attack of laughter coming on when I caught sight of myself in the glass of a low window. Not even in my fur tabard nor in my three-masted barque had I ever looked so completely and utterly ridiculous. I laughed for so long and so uncontrollably that all who passed me, I could see from my little eye-holes, shunned me as one gone suddenly mad in the street.

I will describe to you how the winter passed.

In December, I went into a plague house and found a man newly dead from the disease and kneeling by him his wife, holding his dead hand and weeping. I asked her what could I do for her and she told me that no one on earth could help her, for the sneezing and shivering that are the first signs of plague she knew would come upon her within a short time. I was about to turn and leave when I heard myself say (in a voice I did not recognise as mine, muffled as it was by the duck snout): "If no one on earth can help you, why not let one John Pearce, who is under the earth, save you from death?" I then held out to her a bottle of medicine. She looked at it for a moment, but then shook her head and returned to her weeping. Despite my very dire need for money, it was beyond me to ask this brave, grief-stricken woman for the one shilling and threepence I usually charge for the remedy, so I nodded to her and went out, leaving the bottle on her table. Four or five weeks later, this person, who had been seeking me for several days, found me and put her arms round my neck and kissed my beak. She had taken the medicine and the symptoms of plague had never come and so she believed that I had saved her.

From this time, when word of this success began to spread, my business prospered. People arrived at Frances Elizabeth's house asking for the medicine, thus relieving me of the need to go into plague houses in search of customers. Frances Elizabeth banked up her fires and burnt herbs on them and would not go near the strangers at her door. And more and more she and Katharine stayed upstairs in the bedroom, Katharine in the bed (where from time to time I made love to her without telling her that it was a love born of loneliness and need, and not of desire) and Frances Elizabeth in a rocking chair. And the two of them dreamed of the child to come and sewed bonnets for him and knitted blankets for his little crib. Katharine would hitch up her skirts and put her hands round her belly that was grown so large and heavy, by the coming of the new year, she looked like a woman come to full term. And the mother would lay her head gently in the middle of the abdomen, where the navel protruded like a rosebud, and feel the kicking of the baby's limbs. They seemed to long so ardently for the birth that this longing took all their time, so that the letter-writing was neglected and even I, downstairs in the parlour with my bottles, was forgotten so that I had the illusion sometimes that I was free once more, as I had been as a student, and not tied to Katharine or to anyone in the world and that I couild walk out into Cheapside and start my life all over again.

I did not give the unborn baby a great deal of attention. I thought of him as belonging only to Katharine and to her mother and not to me, as if I had made them a present of him. They wanted their present to be male. They wanted the son who could rise to prosperity in the Office of Patents and they named him Anthony, after the dead father. And one evening, an astrologer was summoned. This astrologer frowned when he learned that I was born under the sign of Aquarius and whispered some words to himself that I did not catch. He predicted that the child would be large and healthy and that, in its infancy, it would learn "a very pretty way with laughter." He set the probable date of birth as the twenty-fifth of February and went away richer by ten shillings, leaving Katharine and Frances Elizabeth disappointed that he had not told them more.

"Of what use is laughter?" sighed Frances Elizabeth. "It has never brought anyone to riches."

My birthday came again. I made no mention of it and there was no rejoicing. I was sullen all day, remembering the foolish Dégeulasse and the false hopes of his wife and daughters. And towards nightfall I thought of Celia, of her grace and sweetness and of her singing.

In the same week, I met, in the apothecary's shop, a man who had been alive for ninety-nine years. He told me that the plague was caused by the tiredness of the earth and that this was but the first stage in the ending of the world. I nevertheless persuaded him to buy a bottle of Pearce's preventative, it being his ardent wish not to die until he had reached the age of one hundred. Before paying for his bottle, however, he asked me what was in the mixture. I told him that it contained crushed rue, sage, and saffron with boiled buttercup-root, snake-root and salt and that these ingredients were infused with Malaga. He smiled and nodded and pronounced the medicine "clever" and left, and as he went out I saw the apothecary bow obsequiously to him.

"Who is that old man?" I asked.

"Do you not know?" said the apothecary. "Do you not recognise the fleshy nose and something in the set of the mouth?"

"No."

"Ah. Well, to me, there is a family likeness. He is the only surviving brother of William Harvey."

For reasons which I do not completely comprehend, I was so affected by this revelation that, instead of returning to Cheapside as I had intended, I walked to a nearby tavern, The Faithful Dray, and ordered myself a small flagon of wine.

I had not drunk any wine for such a great while that a very little of it rendered me categorically drunk and I sat in my corner, foolishly sipping, glad that I was not known in The Faithful Dray and so forced to enter into any conversation. I was about to order a second flagon (having now remembered that solitary drinking can be an oddly enjoyable pastime) when I heard someone say, very meekly and politely: "Good morning, Sir Robert."

I looked up. A man stood before me, so cadaverously thin that his face resembled a skeleton more nearly than the painted faces of the Flagellants. On top of this gaunt visage, he wore a blond wig, once fine but now matted and greasy and clogged with old powder. He had on his back a torn green coat and the hand he held out to me was encased in a green glove. I stared and blinked. And then the knowledge of who he was seeped into me. It was Finn.

If he had not had the courage to apologise to me for spying on me for the King, I would have got up and left him, without any regard for his sorrowful condition. But the first words he spoke were words of apology, and following on these came the story of what had happened to him. And both the apology and the tale were pitiful, the first being very stammering and clumsy and the second being full of suffering and humiliation.

You will remember that, while I was delirious with the measles, Celia left me and returned to the King, taking Finn and the finished portrait with her.

During this journey, Finn began to dream. He dreamed of the King's hand slapping him on the back and pressing a purse full of gold into his palm. He dreamed of all the commissions to come (ah, the beauty of that word "commission" for all the unknown artists and poets!) and all the imaginary arcadian landscapes in which he would place his famous sitters.

After the dreams came the arrival. The portrait of Celia was unloaded from the coach and Finn carried it himself down the length of the Stone Gallery, believing that on this occasion the doors to the King's apartments would be straight away opened to admit him. But they were not. He waited in the Stone Gallery for two days, his mind so enchanted by his imminent preferment that he left his spot only once to eat a little meal of bread and sausage and to relieve himself. He slept with his head on the stone.

On the third day, he was summoned. The King looked down at the portrait (behind which Finn was humbly kneeling). His Majesty ordered lamps to be brought near to it. Then he leaned down from his great height and scratched at the pigment with his nail. A flake of burnt umber came off and adhered to his finger. He examined it and called for a silk handkerchief in which to deposit the flake. The handkerchief was brought to him. He flapped it at the picture. "Gaudy," he said, "and shallow. The antithesis of Lady Merivel. Take it away."

Finn saw the folly of protesting. He saw that to argue with the King would avail him nothing and lose for him the little money he would be given for the portrait, if he remained silent. And yet he protested. He came out from behind the picture and began to describe the pains he had taken with the thing, his care with the background and the fondness Celia had shown both for him and for the portrait. The King turned his back on him and walked away towards his bedchamber. Finn shouted after him that he owed him at least the seven livres promised in the contract and that no man would trust a King of England who did not keep his word. The King stopped in his tracks and called for his guards. Finn was arrested and sent to the Tower.

He languished in the Tower for seven months. He was not charged, he was forgotten. Celia's intercession eventually secured his release. He was ordered never to come to Whitehall again or to any place where the Monarch resided. He made his way to Norfolk, believing that Violet Bathurst would help him, but he found the Bathurst household in dereliction. Old Bathurst had died and been put into his mausoleum and Violet – whether in sadness for the loss of him or for the loss of me one cannot say – courted a daily oblivion in the fine Alicantes her late husband had hoarded in his cellar. She gave Finn fourteen shillings and the stuffed head of a marten cat and sent him away. Going out from her house, he was bitten by one of Bathurst 's hounds desperate for the taste of blood.

And so he returned to London, where he expected to die. He earned a poor living painting scenery at the Dukes Playhouse, but his anger against the King and against a world that would not value him was so great that it gnawed at his body as well as at his mind. It was, literally, wasting him.

All of this he told me at The Faithful Dray. We got so drunk together, we fell unconscious onto the floor and when we woke it was dark and the landlord was throwing a bucket of water over us. We went out into the street and vomited into the gutter. Then I took Finn home with me to Cheapside, and Katharine and Frances Elizabeth looked up from their sewing and stared at his hollowed, suffering face. I invited him to sit down at the table and after a while some knuckle stew with barley was served to us. As Finn spooned his to his mouth, I noticed tears coursing down his cheeks. They dribbled into his bowl of stew, making it more salty and watery than it already was.

Finn slept on a cot in the small dark room where Frances Elizabeth wrote her letters. He liked its smell of ink and paper and sealing wax and, after his first night in it, he asked me if he might stay a month or two ("only until the spring comes, Sir Robert…") at the low rent he could afford as a scenery painter.

Frances Elizabeth agreed. Gradually, her house was filling up with people, but she did not seem to mind. From being a very anxious-seeming and complaining person, she had become calm and enduring, and I surmise that she had found her years of solitude very difficult to bear. She never talked to me about Katharine's madness or about the day she had taken her to Whittlesea, or what had driven her to abandon her daughter. She never said that she believed Katharine was cured. It was as if she did not wish to remember the past – the death of her husband on the very steps of the Patents Office, the desertion of Katharine by the stone mason, the coming of sleeplessness and lunacy – but to savour the present and plan for the future, when her grandson would come into the world and grow to manhood and responsibility and let the women rest.

After the coming of Finn, however, when she heard me addressed as "Sir Robert", she began to write a letter to the Ecclesiastical Courts requesting that her daughter be allowed to divorce the stone mason "who has disappeared into the very aire" so that she could marry the father of her child. I sat down by Frances Elizabeth and gently took the quill from her hand. I intended to inform her that I, too, had a wife to whom the King himself had married me, but then I found I could not say these things to Katharine's mother, so I informed her instead that I did not believe there was any "e" on the end of "air" and that her writing was not as elegant in these letters as it sometimes was and that churchmen "being very fond of show and outward appearance" would be influenced in their decision by the beauty of the hand. So she tore up the letter and started it again, but I did not stay to watch her.