Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  ‘You note its neatness? No stitch too loose, nor any pulled too tight.’

  ‘Yes, I do note. A marvellous Neatness.’

  ‘The Patterns are already upon the material,’ says the King to me in a low voice. ‘They are put there in Advance by the Artists’ stamps and dyes, so all she has to do is to follow them. Where the Artists have put blue, there she will sew with blue thread, and I have noted that she never transgresses this. She will never introduce green where there is no green. Because she is following a Pattern and the Pattern gives her days their purpose and their calm.’

  I cannot find any reply to this. I am gazing at the woman in a rapt kind of way, for the reason that she reminds me of someone. There is something in the way her head tilts towards her work and in her stillness upon the chair, which I know I have seen before, but I can by no means recall when or where.

  ‘You see how content she is?’ the King whispers to me.

  ‘She does appear to be …’

  ‘No. She is. This I know to be true and beyond question. I believe the Stoics used to term this state ataraxia, or “freedom from Anxiety”. And how dearly one wishes for this state. Truly, I would relinquish my Kingdom to come upon such marvellous peace of mind. Would not you?’

  ‘I would, except that I have no Kingdom, Sir.’

  ‘Yes, you do. For you are a Kingdom Entire unto yourself, Merivel! You are you, with all your chaos of heart and all your great Fears. Would you not prefer to spend your days upon that chair?’

  I am about to say that by no means would I like to spend my days upon a chair, looping thread in and out of linen weft, when I find myself suddenly unable to speak. For I know – all at once – who this woman is: it is my former wife, Celia.

  I feel very cold. I turn to the King, as if wanting the shelter of his arms. ‘Sir,’ I say. ‘It is Celia!’

  He stays aloof from me, plucking idly upon his moustache, watching Celia as she returns to her sewing.

  ‘Yes,’ he says at last. ‘It is Celia.’

  ‘And yet …’

  ‘Not as you and I knew her. No. She is quite mad and has been so for many years.’

  ‘Ah,’ I say. ‘What Calamity brought her to madness?’

  ‘My dear Merivel, you surely know the answer to this as well as I. Celia was unable to recover from the disappointment of finding her bed empty of the King of England.’

  I am silent, looking intently at the woman, whose beauty once brought my life very close to ruin. Now there is no vestige of that beauty remaining.

  ‘Her parents sheltered her for many long years,’ the King continues. ‘But when they died I arranged for her to be brought here. It was the least I could do. She does not recognise me, of course – nor you. But hers is not a Boiling Madness, such as you once described encountering at your Fenland Bedlam. It is an Insanity of Unknowing. Therefore she is at peace.’

  Behind Celia, in the depths of the room where the lamplight and the firelight does not reach, sits an old woman, also mute upon a chair, whom I take to be Celia’s guardian, or Nurse. I think about the blazing light that had once shone upon Celia’s existence. And it does appear to me to be a most wretched thing that she now resides here, not yet old, but living the life of an elderly Crone, with a true Crone as her only companion, both of them mired in Darkness and forgotten.

  ‘How can you know that she is at peace, Sir?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, look at her, Merivel,’ says the King. ‘Regard her concentration. Nothing disturbs the moment-to-moment tranquil onflow of her mind.’

  ‘Would she not like it to be disturbed – by a visit to the Duke’s Playhouse, or by some games of Cribbage, or by—’

  ‘No. On the contrary. She would be entirely confused by these things, for she can no longer remember their Laws.’

  I walk away from the Palace in the early afternoon. I am in such a state of Perturbation after my encounter with Celia that I unbuckle my Sword and carry it over my shoulder like a Blunderbuss until I come to a vacant iron bench, where I let it fall upon the ground with a terrible clatter, then sit down and mop my brow, and try to calm the beating of my heart.

  Why does it beat so? Because the name ‘Celia Clemence’ will, to the day of my death, catch at my heart …

  As The Wedge relates in great detail, in 1664 I entered into a most extraordinary and unlooked-for Pact with the King. Till then a lowly Doctor to the Royal Dogs at Whitehall, I was, upon the King’s strange whim, taken from this Veterinary work and offered an Estate in Norfolk and a Knighthood.

  In return for these bounties I was ordered to become the bridegroom of Celia Clemence, the King’s youngest mistress, so that his liaison with her might be camouflaged from the world and, in particular, from his première amour, Lady Castlemaine. But there was a Condition put upon the Bargain: I was forbidden by His Majesty to touch my wife. I was to be her husband in name only – a Paper Groom, a Professional Cuckold. In effect, I was invited to trade my Honour for worldly riches and preferment – and I agreed.

  And so I was married to Celia. On my Wedding Night the King, not I, made love to my bride.

  For some long while, being caught up with other diversions and very fervent in my mad revels at Bidnold with my own mistress, Lady Bathurst, I was able to remain true to my promise. Celia resided most often in London. Though she was a very pretty woman, I seldom thought of her.

  But one day, after the King had sent her to Bidnold for a space, I heard her singing in my Music Room. I sat myself down upon a chair outside the room and listened. Celia Clemence sang with extraordinary musicality and passion. And alas, alas, I was so moved by the sound of this sweet, perfected voice, that not only did it lead me swiftly to one of my bouts of Blubbing, it began, from that moment, to alter all my feelings towards my wife and led me very swiftly to the notion that I was in love with her.

  This delusion grew very strong in me as the succeeding days and weeks passed. I longed to possess Celia as a true bride. I knew that I should have tried to quell my inclination, that my Bargain with the King was unbreakable, but I did not seem able to supress my feelings of desire.

  On a starry night, taking Celia with me to the Leads of my roof, with the pretended promise of finding for her the planet Jupiter in the sky, I turned to her and, in an unseemly scramble, seized her in my arms and attempted to kiss her. I had thought, because she had recently been very civil and kindly towards me, that she might find it in herself to return my ardour, but I was deluded. She resisted me as fiercely as an angry Ostrich and pushed me away so violently that I almost fell sixty feet into the garden. Then she ran from me, screaming for her maid, and I understood what I had already helplessly known: that my wife felt nothing for me but contempt and detestation.

  And now, in terror, alone upon the freezing roof, I saw what was going to befall me. I had transgressed the King’s Law. Like Adam, I had done the one and only thing I had been forbidden to do. When word of my behaviour reached the King’s ears, as I knew it would soon enough, His Majesty would banish me from the Paradise I had imagined would be mine for ever.

  And I was indeed summoned to Whitehall. In the space of a brief audience the King took away from me everything he had given me, including my title and my house. All that remained to me were a few clothes, a few shillings and my chestnut mare, Danseuse.

  In terrible sorrow I rode back to Bidnold for the last time, packed the few possessions remaining to me, said goodbye to Will Gates and Cattlebury and my other Servants, and began my long, lonely journey to the Fens, where Pearce and his Quaker Friends had founded their Bedlam. I did not wish to go there, to work among the Mad, but I did not know where else I might find shelter. When Pearce saw me arrive, he ran to me and called my name, and the Quakers took me in.

  And it was here, in time, that I was seduced by Margaret’s mother, Katharine.

  All this, in its fiery Frenzy and confusion, The Wedge sets down …

  To cheer myself now, and to try to banish all memories of Celia, a
nd all memories of Katharine and the Bedlam, I take out of the pocket of my Russet Coat a very valuable Document given to me by the King. This is a Letter addressed to his cousin, King Louis XIV of France, asking that: ‘Sir Robert Merivel be made welcome at the Court of Versailles and given, if he should request it, a temporary position as Physician of the Second or Third Rank.’

  Despite the somewhat condescending mention of ‘Second or Third Rank’, I realise that I am nevertheless, at this moment, one of the most Favoured of men and that I have got this favour, in a single afternoon, without Travail or Deceit, but only by being Myself.

  I know, too, that I should now bend all my thoughts towards travelling to France. ‘Woe to you, Merivel,’ I say to myself, ‘if you do not move onwards in your life and resume you search for Meaning. You must make haste to reach the land of the inimitable Montaigne. If you do not strive to do this now, you will surely end upon a chair in some attic, stitching rags with green thread. And that destiny is to be strenuously avoided!’

  But I am tired. I am not yet capable of travelling even as far as Dover. My head still boils with the cruelties of the Past. I yearn for rest and consolation.

  I go where I always go when my body and mind are troubled.

  She lives now in a very bright and clean apartment above her Premises, Mrs Pierpoint’s Superior Laundry on London Bridge. The great River boils eternally about the elm stanchions beneath her.

  Being older now, she does not get many visitors of the kind that I am, but makes a Living Entire from her Laundry, with two girls, Marie and Mabel, working under her guidance, lathering and scrubbing and rinsing and ironing, all in a perpetual cumulus of steam. She tells me that her Laundry is now ‘famed throughout London’ and that people trudge many miles through the mud and the rain to bring their washing here.

  I find her at her Ironing Table, her arms and face cherubically pink, as they were always wont to be, and her hair, greying a little now, tied up rather fetchingly in a pink scarf.

  ‘Rosie!’ I call out. ‘Rosie Pierpoint!’

  She looks up and sees me, all smart in my Russet Coat and shining wig, and she sets down her Iron and comes to me straight away and puts her arms round me and kisses my lips. ‘Sir Rob,’ she says, ‘I am full of joy to see you.’

  Her body, always fleshy, is now categorically fat and the skin of her face is not smooth as it once was, but these changes to her have not lessened my Desire for her, but only tempered it with a sweet Sadness, which mysteriously adds to its intensity.

  We retire to Rosie’s Bedchamber, hung with Muslin at the window and seeming to be a kind of airy receptacle for all the music of the river, its churning and shouting and lamenting and laughter. In this way all that we whisper to each other and all that we do is taken in and gathered by the world, and we become as one with it, minute specks of moving flesh, yet alive still, swimming and breathing in the Cauldron of Time.

  4

  I BOARDED THE Night Coach at Deptford.

  It was conducted by an elderly Coachman, with a swarthy Guard, standing behind. Both men appeared weathered by the seasons and by all that they had undergone upon the dark Dover Road.

  Inside the coach I found myself with five companions of assorted fortunes. One of these was a Minister of God and he (putting me much in mind of Pearce’s way of conducting himself in the world) chose to bless our little company as the horses began to struggle forth and the wheels of the coach to turn. Nobody asked him to do this, but he did it anyway, and this I find I do dislike among the very pious, that they must always assume a man’s soul requires their Intervention, without first politely enquiring whether that soul wishes it or not.

  Another of our number, a Landowner of some corpulence, thanked him after this blessing was given and said: ‘I am much at peace now, Reverend. I had been prey to imagining Highwaymen coming down upon us, but henceforth I shall fear no such thing.’

  The year was running down into December and the night was frosty. Clean straw had been strewn upon the coach floor and we all, in time, reached for this straw and began to heap it about our legs, to try to warm them.

  I attempted to doze, but I was seated between the Reverend’s lank bones and the Landowner’s greasy rump, and could find no way to balance myself between these two disparate nubs of flesh, and so felt forced to hold myself upright, as though about to rise from my seat. And then what did the Man of God and the Man of Substance do but fall towards each other in their noisy sleep behind me, so cutting off absolutely my body’s contact with the seat’s back.

  Opposite me were three women, in their middle years and so much resembling each other that I took them for sisters, or even triplets, born in the same hour. What preoccupied them chiefly was the enormous basket of provisions they had brought with them for the journey, and they passed between them legs of Chicken and spiced Meat Patties and salted Radishes and a flask of Ale, consuming everything as though indeed they were never going to eat again.

  After a while of their identical gobbling, drinking and munching, I found myself in the grip of a most frightful hunger, and I took the liberty to remind them that, in France, the food was said to be most abundant, diverse and excellently prepared. But they merely reminded me with identical sniffs of disdain that it was ‘as well to be furnished with our own good larder’.

  ‘True,’ I said, ‘and alas, I myself did not bend my thoughts towards any larder whatsoever for this journey to Dover’, hoping to get from them a small Patty or at least a chicken wing, but they chose to ignore my evident distress. All they offered me was a Radish, which, being bitter, brought to my stomach an unwelcome excess of bile, and I found myself disliking the triplets intensely and feeling sorry for the woman who had borne them.

  Some long time after midnight, I (being the only person still awake inside the coach) heard the sound of hooves approaching fast from behind us, and our conveyance began to judder and tremble as the Coachman cracked the whip over the poor nags labouring through the dark, spurring them to something like a gallop. Still the other rider came on, nearer and nearer, and then I heard a shout: ‘Put up! Put up! Or I shall take your lives!’ And I knew that, despite the blessing given out to us by the Reverend, we were now about to lose our lives or our limbs or our livres to a Kentish Highwayman.

  With much whinnying of the horses, and tearing and grinding of the wheels on the flinty road, the coach was pulled up. This terrifying, lurching stop woke my fellow passengers, who looked about them like children, all damp from their dreaming, and searching in vain for their mothers or their nurses.

  ‘Do not fear,’ said I with a smile. ‘’Tis assuredly only a Highwayman!’

  And I must admit it did amuse me to see, by the guttering light of the coach lamps, the Shock on all the faces, and to witness their sudden scrabbling, as they attempted to shovel their possessions further under the seats. One of the triplets thrust her shawl over the food basket, and the Landowner took a stuffed purse from his pocket and tried to slither it down into his boot, but his leg was a mite too fat and the neck of the purse stuck out at the top. The Priest snatched up the cross he wore round his neck, not to kiss it or to beg of it any Divine Help, but only to hide it beneath his robe, because it was made of silver.

  I now bethought myself of what I might do, to save what I had taken with me, but I had nothing much concealed about me, all my possessions (which included some fine new clothes I had had made in London) being inside two Valises mounted with all the other baggage on the roof of the coach. And I did not think that Highwaymen, needing to make swift their escapes, could often burden themselves with trunks and boxes. Their prime currency was Currency.

  The King’s Letter to Louis XIV, however, in the pocket of my coat, did cause me some concern, for without this I had no entrée into France – and I know that the King’s Signature and Seal may always fetch a goodly price, regardless of the document to which they are attached. I put my hand on the letter, as though putting my hand on my heart, yet at the same tim
e found myself thinking, ‘if I cannot get to France, then I cannot, and there’s an end to it. And nothing matters to me in my life but the safety and happiness of Margaret, and to hear, from time to time, the approving laughter of my Sovereign.’ And, knowing that these thoughts were true beyond all doubt, I suddenly understood why I was not in the least afraid.

  Soon enough, the door of the coach was tugged open and a strange visage appeared, with a hat pulled low over its eyes and some foulard or muffler tied about its face, so that it seemed to be All Nose and nothing else.

  This Nose sniffed the noisome air of the interior where we sat, its helpless victims, then a gloved Hand reached in and the Hand held a Flintlock Pistol, which it pointed first at me, then at the Priest and lastly at the triplets, who, well-fortified with Ale and Pasties, strove to be brave and stifle their screams.

  Then a low Voice spoke: ‘I do humbly beg your pardons, Gents. Ladies, please accept my Apologies. But I am come to a bad pass and have no means to live and pay my debts, except to rob you. I trust you will pardon me.’

  ‘Ah,’ whispered I to the Priest, whose trembling I could feel all through my being, ‘a very polite and courteous Highwayman.’

  ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ said the Voice. ‘Who speaks? Is it you, Sir?’

  I said nothing, but saw the Flintlock pointed again at me.

  ‘’Tis no use to think you can escape me,’ said the Voice, and the Nose sniffed back and forth, perhaps smelling the roast Chicken or the fragrant pies. ‘Life deals its cards. I regret the inconvenience. Just give me all your money. That is all I ask. Then I shall be on my way. And you may carry on to Dover.’

  Nobody moved. I could still see the purse sticking out of the Landowner’s boot and, as my eyes went to it, so did the Nose move itself downwards and then another Hand appeared and snatched the purse away. The Landowner uttered a little cry of rage and the Priest, seeing that our Highwayman was in Earnest of his Profession, began to babble about being a Poor Man of God, who owned nothing.