Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  ‘There is no human life, Sir, free from Transgression.’

  ‘That may be. But did you know, my friend, that I appropriated ninety per cent of the Dues from the Postal Service to pay for Barbara Castlemaine’s Pension?’

  ‘Well, no, I did not, Sir, but—’

  ‘I did it for the sake of Quietness – that she would not nag me any more. But men have suffered because of it. They have lost what was rightly theirs. And a hundred other things have I done, which come to haunt me.’

  ‘A mere hundred? I marvel at so few. Pearce once accused me of committing a hundred follies a week!’

  A smile spreads across the King’s countenance. It is a familiar smile, one that says ‘this is why I like you, Merivel, why I love you, even, because you lighten what is heavy and make laughter from sorrow’.

  But now I want to make some reply to this. I want to say: ‘If you take my daughter from me, if you treat her as you treated my unfortunate wife, Celia, then I can no longer be your Fool; I shall become your Enemy.’

  These words form endlessly in my mind, but do not force themselves into my mouth, and I tell myself that for all my deep anxiety on this score, I can, in truth, do nothing at present except to be patient and to see what Time brings forth.

  An image of the King holding Margaret to him beside the Stockade and stroking her hair comes into my mind, but I force it away, telling myself to read nothing into it, only the King’s kindness and readiness with comfort, after the moments of danger to us all and the near loss of a precious dog. I must not see Transgression where there is none.

  Will reappears at this juncture with the Caraway Cake, apologising that there are no cherries, ‘for that Cattlebury cannot send them up’.

  ‘Why can he not send them up, Will?’ I ask.

  ‘Beg pardon, Sir?’

  ‘You heard me perfectly well. Why cannot Cattlebury send up the cherries?’

  ‘Well, Sir Robert, I cannot rightly say …’

  ‘Perhaps I can “rightly say” that he cannot send them up, because he has eaten them?’

  ‘Well, he did, Sir. But he ate them only because he had a little difficulty with his Stools, Sir, and a cherry will loosen the Stool, as you informed us, but he did not mean any harm.’

  At this the King lets out a great roar of laughter. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘this has cheered me! He did not mean any harm! There is Anarchy in the kitchen, Merivel, but it is apparently quite harmless!’

  ‘It is not harmless,’ I say with unheralded but emphatic severity. ‘Please tell Cattlebury, Will, that my patience is at an end. One more transgression of this kind, and—’

  ‘And what, Sir?’

  ‘It is the End of the Road. He will be cast out.’

  Silence falls in the Withdrawing Room. The King and Will both regard me with astonishment. Then out of my mouth come the words that I wish to be heard elsewhere, but address instead, via Will, to my disobedient cook.

  ‘Remind Cattlebury,’ I say, ‘that I am a man of good humour, a man to whom Loyalty towards those I care for and who depend upon me was ever a solemn pledge in my heart. But remind him also that my Loyalty can be tested too far! Please impress this fact upon him. I can be pushed to anger – as when I saw Farmer Sands whipping his Shire horse till it died. And Sands, in time, had to yoke himself to his plough to till his pitiful fields. And did I feel one jot of sorrow or pity for him? No, I did not. My anger had taken away all my compassion. And so it shall be, Will! So it shall be with Cattlebury, if I am tested too far.’

  Under the burden of these unexpected words, Will sinks down onto the floor and his bald wig falls aslant his face. The King rises to help him to his feet.

  I, too, rise up, but not to help Will, only to snatch a slice of Caraway Cake from the dish and cram it into my mouth, to stop myself from bursting into tears.

  17

  I COULD NOT for too long delay my promise to Violet Bathurst to cut out her Cancer.

  Though I shied from the task, I knew that I had to discover in me some will to do it, before the Thing spread. For the thought of Violet dying alone in her dark chamber was a very sorrowful one. I do hold and believe that the deaths of those who have taken irrepressible pleasure in their moment-to-moment existence – in a world where many people seem sunk in a physical and spiritual twilight, or half-life – are to be especially mourned.

  The Nurse I wanted to help with the Cutting was one Mrs McKinley, a bonny and kind Irishwoman, whose Catholic family had fled to England after the Protestant Settlements in Ireland in 1641. Mrs McKinley, now in her fifties and grown a little stout, had the gentlest, surest hands I have ever beheld in all my work with Nurses. More than this, her voice is of a great sweetness of tone and this, I have often observed, brings comfort to the Patient.

  It also offers to me an accompaniment of amusement as I work, for that, in her Donegal accent, she addresses me as ‘Sir Rabbit’, and no matter how many times she says this, it always brings a smile to my lips and thus, though my fingers may be in a tangle of flesh and gore, I am afforded enough Lightness of Heart to be able to carry on.

  To buy Opium for Violet, I first had to visit my most favoured Apothecary, Mr Dunn, in Norwich, a member of the Worshipful Society of the Art and Mystery of Apothecaries.

  Of this designation the King had observed that the word ‘mystery’ appeared to him to be ‘an inconvenient noun’, which should not belong there.

  ‘One does not wish there to be any mystery in the matter,’ he pointed out. ‘One wishes, on the contrary, that the Apothecary’s knowledge be proven, or at least theoretical, as opposed to hypothetical, let alone mired in the Unknown. Is this not so, Merivel?’

  I agreed that it was. The King then announced that he would be interested to talk to Mr Dunn and to inspect his premises. We thus travelled to Norwich together in the King’s coach, and by the time we got there a great press of people, recognising the King’s Livery on his coachmen, had surrounded us.

  I descended first and savoured the disappointment on the faces of the Crowd when they saw me (a mere Sir Rabbit) and not their Sovereign. But then I reached up my hand, and the King took it and descended in elegant style, notwithstanding the little limp that the obstinate Sore on his left leg has given him, and a great cry of rejoicing went up from the people assembled, and they reached out to try to touch the King, and a woman passed him her baby to hold in his arms.

  I could see Mr Dunn, standing at the door of his Apothecary’s Shoppe. I had not been able to give him any warning about the King’s arrival, and when Dunn caught sight of his Sovereign, his body began to jerk in spasms of incredulity. He took off his Spectacles and put them on again, fearing his eyes were deceiving him. Then, suddenly bethinking himself of how he appeared that day, he cavorted into his Shoppe to remove his Wig and replace it with a better one.

  Some time passed before we could make our way inside the Shoppe. Still holding the baby, the King embarked upon numerous conversations with the Crowd, enquiring after the Wool Trade in Norfolk and the Herring Fleets, and hearing how, in all honesty, the times were not very good ‘for that people go short of money, Sir, after the hard winter storms, when the Fleets could not put out’ and when ‘many sheep had their breath frozen in their gullets by the ice and snow’.

  I saw that the King listened attentively to these tales of dead sheep and unfished herrings, but offered no remedy. All he could find to say was: ‘You must hold on. You people of Norfolk are stubborn and true. We are in May weather now. Better days are coming. You must hold on.’

  When he said this, one man, a poor Fisherman, barged his way through the press of citizens to show the King his naked ribcage, which was so scantily clad with flesh, it could only put me in mind of Pearce’s body just before he died. The man beat upon his ribs with his fists and cried out: ‘I’m a beggar in Norwich now, Sir! Look at me! I had a Herring Boat at Yarmouth, but it was lost in the January tides and all my livelihood with it. And I have five children. Tell me how I am to �
��hold on”!’

  At this the King passed the baby back to its mother and turned to me, snapped his fingers and said: ‘Coins, Merivel! Give this poor Fellow a shilling or a half-crown immediately.’

  Then, as I scrabbled in my pockets for my Purse, he said to the Fisherman, ‘Sudden loss is part of Life, as I, who lost my Father so cruelly, know well. And all we can do is to bear it. But here … here is kind Sir Robert Merivel, who will furnish you with a shilling or two, and tonight you and your family will eat your fill.’

  Hands reached out to me – not only the filthy hand of the Fisherman-Beggar – and in less than one minute I was obliged to part with every bit of money that I had, for in a Crowd you cannot give to one and ignore the rest. The reaching out to me for coins only ended when I turned my purse inside out, to show that I had not one penny more to give. Nobody thanked me. And when at last we were able to turn and walk into Mr Dunn’s premises, the King did not seem to have absorbed the fact that now I had no Means with which to buy the Opium I needed for Violet’s Cutting. All he said was: ‘I do not like it when I am face to face with Poverty and Want.’

  Suspended from the ceiling in Mr Dunn’s Shoppe is a strange variety of Stuffed Creatures: an Alligator, a Turtle, an Eel and a brace of Toads.

  When you enter here, the slight stench from these Exhibits, which have hung there for a goodly time, might incline you to turn and walk out again, and I saw the King’s nostrils dilate, and he produced from his sleeve a handkerchief scented with Lavender water and held it to his nose awhile.

  Then the scientific curiosity, which impelled him to start his own Laboratory at Whitehall and to give a Royal Charter to the Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge by Experiment, led him to forget any bodily inconvenience. He began to pick his careful way around Dunn’s dark emporium, noting what the jars and galley pots and gourds contained, and setting aside his handkerchief to sniff at them. Then he suddenly turned to the Apothecary and asked: ‘Where did you acquire your knowledge, Dunn? Was it properly come by?’

  Adjusting his wig, Dunn stammered out that he had been apprenticed to an Apothecary as a boy of sixteen, and being ‘both curious and reckless’, had tried very many types of Physick on himself, ‘to see what they would do to me …’

  ‘How interesting,’ said the King. ‘Curiosity and recklessness may both be fine attributes in a man. I have often thought it.’

  ‘Well, and in this way, Your Majesty,’ said Dunn, stammering no more, ‘when the Physicians prescribe, I can sometimes make a Correction, for that I have kept a Notebook of everything I tried, with all the quantities and manifestations of symptoms, and special notice of all the False Cures.’

  ‘False Cures?’

  ‘Sir Robert knows,’ said Dunn, ‘the quantity of Mountebanks in this country! They will sell anything, Sir, call it “a Beautiful and Efficacious Vomit”, say, and sell no matter what for a shilling and sixpence. It might be Rat Poison. It might nearly kill you. But some Physicians, they scarcely know what preparation does what to what, so then the Apothecary’s knowledge, if it can, must be the Corrective to a False Cure.’

  The King nodded approvingly. ‘Nullius in Verba,’ he said quietly. ‘The Motto I gave to the Royal Society. Take no man’s word for it. All should be done by proper experimentation. And you, Mr Dunn, seem to have followed this dictum admirably, by testing Compounds on yourself, though I warrant you may have got near to dying for it!’

  ‘Well, I did, Sir. More than once. But here I am, alive. And what I like about my Trade is that there is no end to Medical Knowledge. Sir Robert, here, has taught me many things I did not know before.’

  The King looked at me in mild astonishment. ‘Has he? Has he really?’

  ‘Many things.’

  ‘Really? We know him chiefly as a Jester. A Jester and a Friend. But would you say he is a Good Physician?’

  ‘Very good, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Ah. How interesting. He once achieved a miraculous cure upon a favourite dog of mine, did you not, Merivel? But I think this was a Cure by Neglect, was it not?’

  ‘Well, I would prefer to call it a Cure by Nature, Your Majesty. As the Great Fabricius said: “Non dimenticare la Natura.” I merely gave Nature time to work.’

  ‘While you drank some fine Alicante and ate some figs and slept …’

  ‘Only in order to pass the time.’

  ‘Ha! You see, Dunn, why we love this man. He keeps laughter alive. But now to our main Business. We need a plentiful supply of Opium and neither of us has any money, for we have given it all away to poor Fisherfolk and the like. Will you accept the King’s Credit?’

  I wished to work upon my Cutting of Violet’s Cancer in bright daylight, so that I could properly see what I was doing.

  I rode to Bathurst Hall and told her that I would come early on the morrow, and commanded her to have her bed removed nearer to the window.

  ‘Mrs McKinley will accompany me,’ I said, ‘and I have stocked my bag with a great Quantity of Opium, so you will not feel any pain.’

  Violet was sitting quietly in her Salon that day, doing Needlework, and finding her thus occupied cast me into gloom, for that I had never seen Violet Bathurst taken up by so static and conventional a Pastime.

  ‘Violet,’ I said, ‘it hurts my soul to see you doing that. Pray let us have no more Embroidery once your Cancer is taken out!’

  She raised her head and gazed at me sadly, holding out the work, which – unlike Celia’s Needlework – was very inelegantly done, with bits and ends of thread hanging down in loops. ‘Merivel,’ she said, ‘do not be so dense. Look what a novice I am. But I must learn to stitch in case, after the operation, it is all that I can do. Do you imagine that a woman with half a breast can play at Skittles?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘After a little Time of Recovery has passed. Indeed, I shall organise a party of Skittles at Bidnold and you can partner the King.’

  Violet shook her head. ‘You are dreaming,’ she said. ‘It will not come about.’

  I rose early and collected Mrs McKinley from her house in Bidnold Village, and I noted how everything about her was clean and scrubbed, from her pink fingernails down to her polished boots.

  I showed her the Opium I had got from Dunn and she said: ‘Lord, Sir Rabbit, you could put an Army to sleep with this Quantity!’ And an Image came to me of the Swiss Guards in the Place des Armes at Versailles, lined up in their ranks, and then falling over in an Opium-induced trance, one by one. And I smiled.

  ‘I am only anxious that Lady Bathurst does not suffer too much,’ I said. ‘But I warn you, she is much given to screaming, it is in her nature and you must try not to be too distracted by this.’

  ‘No, no, Sir. I shall not be distracted. All my children were Screamers. I just shut my ears and said my prayers, and all went into a lovely Quietness.’

  We arrived at Bathurst Hall and straight away were shown up to where Violet lay on her bed in its new position near the window. She looked very pale and the fierce easterly light etched lines on her skin that I had not noticed before. When I bent over her she reached up and pulled me towards her. ‘Merivel,’ she said, ‘I am afraid …’

  ‘It will be quick, Violet,’ I said. ‘In less than five minutes it will be over. We shall then stay by you while you sleep.’

  I had commanded that a fire be lit in the room and a cauldron of water set on it to heat, and this had been done as I had asked. While I positioned a chair near the bed and prepared my Scalpel, Mrs McKinley mixed a good quantity of the Opium powder with Brandy to make Laudanum and Violet swallowed this down. I watched her eyes flicker as it began to enter her blood.

  Mrs McKinley then gently removed the top part of Violet’s nightgown and took out clean muslin rags and washed the area of the Cutting in hot water and then with Tincture of Witch Hazel. After this she lifted Violet’s arm and cleaned that also, saying, ‘’Twill be Nothing, My Lady. You shall see. In a trice it will be gone.’ With the cleaning d
one, she laid a square of linen under the arm, strapped Violet’s wrists to the bedposts and begged her to stay as still as she was able.

  At the door stood Violet’s maid, Agatha, a pretty dimpled girl, torn, I could see, between wanting to stay with her Mistress and desiring to flee. I turned to her and said: ‘Agatha, go downstairs and heat a Warming Pan. The shock of a Cutting can make a person very cold. I shall call to you when I want it brought here. Find woollen blankets and bring them too.’

  The girl curtseyed and fled away. I looked over at Mrs McKinley.

  ‘We shall give the Laudanum a little more time,’ I said, ‘then we shall begin.’

  Mrs McKinley pressed a white linen cap onto her head and rolled up her sleeves. She took Violet’s hand in hers, gently stroking the palm. This stroking seemed to calm Violet, and we saw her eyes close and heard her breathing become deeper.

  I raised the Scalpel. I told Mrs McKinley to press upon the breast, to draw the skin tight for the Cutting. As she did so, the Thing seemed to enlarge itself and I saw now that some small outcrop of it extended down into Violet’s armpit, and this dismayed me, for I thought it would be a clean round Nub I was taking out, as if removing an eyeball from its socket, and now I understood that my Scalpel would have to make a second cut and then a third.

  Mrs McKinley saw this too. ‘I think ’tis more than it at first seemed, Sir Rabbit,’ she whispered to me. ‘Look there. And you will have to get it all.’

  I took a breath. I cannot ever cut into another person’s body without remembering how I had to hack deep into Katharine’s body to deliver Margaret, and in consequence I remain calm, for I know that nothing could terrify me as profoundly as that operation did.

  I made two swift cuts, like a cross, in the centre of the Cancer. Not much blood flowed. I lifted back the skin and investigated how deep I would have to go to bring out the lump of Cancerous matter, which was mottled purple and white in its colour and looked to me like some Sea Creature clinging to a rock pool.