I could not stay with Rosie. Our old amours had been fiery. Now, they, too, were out. I think that all we felt for each other was a sad tenderness. I gave her thirty shillings (I would not lack for money for some while, if I was prudent) and she gave me a little kiss on my cheek that was still mottled by the old imprint of my measles. And we said adieu.
And so I am come to Bath.
The most strange thing about the pain of the individual man is that the world, knowing nothing of it, behaves as if it was not there, going shrieking on and applauding itself, making sport and promenading and telling jokes and falling down with laughter. So, as I enter the Cross Bath and immerse myself, wearing nothing but some unbleached pantaloons, I see that round and above me in the stone galleries fully-clothed people are strolling with a superior air of contentment, gossiping and giggling and fanning themselves and looking upon the bathers with an elegant nonchalance. They know nothing of what has befallen me. They could not imagine that in these waters, which smell most curiously of boiled egg, I am trying to cure myself of being Merivel.
I look round at my fellow bathers. The Cross Bath is divided: men on one side, women on the other. In my line of men, I see one elderly creature with his wig still unwisely in place on his head. If he has come for a cure for vanity, he is already inhibiting its efficacy.
Opposite me, the women appear most strange. For modesty, they wear peculiar yellow garments made of stiff canvas which, the moment they are submerged, inflate like balloons. I cannot take my eyes from them. I imagine them so filled with air that they will begin to bob about and then come floating towards me, helpless on the bubbling current of the bath. I can even feel the press of them round me, these balloons of women, and I fashion for the King (as my mind is so much in the habit of doing) some second-rate joke that plays on the word "prick".
But then I see that not only with my joke am I in error: I have perceived the women wrongly. Their skirts and bodices are not filled up with air, but with water. They are not light, but heavy – so heavy they are tethered to their seats, as if by an anchor. If we all stayed in the Cross Bath till nightfall, the women would ever remain separate from us. Unless, of course, the King were to come down and get into the water. Then, I believe the women would break free like minnows from their birth sacs and come wiggling towards him.
I pass very long hours sitting still in the water; I try to feel the process of cleansing occurring. I force myself to visit, in my mind, all the rooms at Bidnold one by one. I stand in each doorway and watch as all my possessions are removed and then the furnishings and the carpets and the wall-hangings so that the room has no hint of my presence in it anywhere. And then I imagine the waters of Bath flowing into it and staining it a sulphurous yellow and then withdrawing like the sea on an ebb tide. And so the room is no longer a room, but only a washed and empty place.
When I can stand the stench of the waters no longer, I retire to my room in the Red Lion. The innkeeper's name is John Sweet. His wife, Mistress Sweet, sings on with no accompaniment and no listeners except herself and Merivel. She alone knows that I am sickly, for the food she sends up I cannot eat.
I dreamed, last night, a most infamous dream. I was in a high chamber at Whitehall where a clutch of gallants and their women, together with the King and his Queen, were assembled. "Why are we all come here?" I asked one I recognised as Sir Rupert Pinworth. "Why," said Sir Rupert, "for the wedding. Naturally."
At that moment, the crowd moved to make a pathway for the bride and groom. I craned my neck to see them. They walked sedately, arm in arm, to the end of the chamber where a priest stood ready to read his prayers over them. The groom wore a villainous sulphur-yellow coat and breeches, the bride a white dress, very pretty, yet stained here and there with the sulphur colour.
And then I saw their faces. The groom had the face of Barbara Castlemaine and the bride the face of Celia. And when the priest had said some prayers and they too murmured some assents, they there, in front of all the people, began to take off their clothes and throw them away impatiently. And I saw now that it was indeed the two women whom the priest had "married" and who now began to play in earnest the groom and bride, kissing each other and touching all indecently each other's parts while the King and his Queen and all of us looked on, applauding now and then, as if at a play. And Sir Rupert leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You see what marriage is become. It is become anything we make it be."
And I woke up, very hot and troubled. And, for poor comfort, put my hand upon my prick.
Knowledge that I should hope for very little from the waters of Bath stole upon me after that night. I felt, not cleansed by the place, but sickened and suffocated by it. The sight of the bodies of the men, many old and palsied, some poxy-seeming, did not help me to love the water. And I was soon weary of watching the women squatting down in their yellow balloons. They appeared to me utterly foolish and pathetic. Rosie Pierpoint has more grace than they.
So I paid John Sweet and bowed to his wife and complimented her on her singing and left, paying threepence a mile for post-horses to return me to London. And when I came there, I saw a thing to which, at Bath, I had paid no heed: the spring had come. In the garden of the Leg Tavern, there were fat buds on a chestnut tree and celandines in the grass and the air was no longer chill as it had been the night I walked to the Tower. Visiting my bookseller, I saw on his almanac that we had begun on the month of March. "Where I shall be at the month's end," I said to him, "I do not know."
I had only to wait two days at the Leg before my groom arrived with Danseuse.
Both man and horse seemed tired and somewhat stiff, but my joy at their arrival was so great I felt, for a few hours, returned to something like contentment. That night, however, I laid out on my bed all the possessions left to me in the world and when I saw what they were, I felt a sweating of fear on my neck, for I knew that no man could depend upon them for his survival. This is what I now owned: my case of surgical instruments, my oboe, some sheets of music, some paint brushes and some boxes of pigment, several suits of gaudy silk and taffeta, a quantity of coloured stockings and lace shirts, three periwigs, four pairs of gloves, made by my father, my set of striped dinner napkins, a quill pen, given to me by Violet Bathurst, some nightshirts and a nightcap, a pair pairs of high-heeled shoes, two letters from the King, tied with a ribbon, my Bible, much thumbed and annotated, a recipe for lardy cake, splodged with Cattlebury's tears, a single fur tabard, two purses: one Japanese, containing thirty shillings, one leather, containing forty-seven sovereigns,
Thanks to my clothes, I would not yet appear poor and, unless I was robbed of the sovereigns, I would not, for some while yet, know poverty at all. And yet there it was, spread out before me, the inevitability of my eventual destitution.
Other men, contemplating such a fall from grace, have made of their low state a springboard from which to jump up and make some new beginning. But in this age, no fortunes are made except at Court. All endeavour – even the labours of a humble glovemaker like my father – is made or marred by favour or dislike at Whitehall. Even common bargemen -like the late Pierpoint – feel, in the new, bustling commercial life upon the river, the touch of the Royal hand. And Rosie at her washing cauldrons: in the jabots and cuffs and collars of Brussels lace worn by the Cavaliers she sees a way to her own prosperity. And I, if I should try some new thing, where would all strivings lead me, but back to where I once walked and waited with my father – to a place so heavy with the King's presence I could not breathe?