I am allotted tasks, almost all of them of a menial and repellent variety and having some foul smell to them. But I perform them. The days I dread are those when I must work at William Harvey. Open the door of William Harvey and you are opening the door of hell. Yesterday, in William Harvey, a woman bit off the tip of her tongue even as I lifted her to put fresh straw into her pen and her blood spurted into my eyes and it was like a flame licking me and I felt a contamination of madness. The house is well named. There is an abundance of blood in it. There is blood in puddles on the floor.
There are many rules we must all obey at Whittlesea. One of these forbids any of the Keeping Friends (for so the small staff of the Bedlam quaintly call themselves) to go alone for any reason whether by day or by night into William Harvey. So it was that when the tip of the bitten tongue fell at my feet and I was splattered with blood, one Friend came quickly to my side. It was Eleanor who came, the younger of two sisters – Eleanor and Hannah – who are women of very sweet and sober disposition. She picked up the tongue tip and put it into her handkerchief and with admirable fortitude Pearce presently sewed it on again. But I prefer not to dwell upon that. I will, instead, tell you a little about these sisters and about the other Friends who make up this small company and who have under their care one hundred mad souls.
The Whittlesea Hospital was founded two years ago by Ambrose and Edmund. Its first occupant was Ambrose's grandfather, an old seaman who lost an eye to Spanish pirates and who, when the King returned, believed himself to have died. He lives quite happily in George Fox. He has an eye of glass that he keeps in a wooden box. He daily remarks that he expected the grave to be darker and more silent and is most glad that there should be company within it.
Ambrose, as noted at my first meeting with him at the gate, is large, obstinate, gentle and very hardy, like a plant with a great growth of root and an indifference to frost or heat or hail or drought. If all the world were to die of some epidemic, I do believe Ambrose would die last of all. Without him there would be no Whittlesea Hospital. Without him, Pearce would still be at St Barts in London and the others, Hannah and Eleanor, Edmund and Daniel, would still be waiting for the revelation of what they call "the True Work shown to us through the Seed of Christ, which is in all people".
Edmund is a man of my age who has twice been imprisoned for entering Anglican churches and causing harm to the clergy by the throwing of cabbages to their heads. He has most bright and round eyes and a high voice and is very fond of order and cleanliness, and will, when it rains in great sweeps across the Fens, take off all his clothes except a ragged pair of drawers and run round and round the walls, the while soaping his face and his torso and even his private parts. If Hannah or Eleanor should glance up and see Edmund engaged in these ablutions, I have noticed that they smile at each other and then look away and continue with their work, but that the smiles stay upon their faces for some while. It is as if they find, in Edmund's ritual, some innocent pleasure.
Both are large women with wide hips planted on sturdy legs. They wear sabots. Hannah's eyes are grey, Eleanor's blue. I believe Hannah to be thirty and Eleanor three or four years younger. They love the Lord with a great abundant love and their charity towards His creatures is very bountiful. I do not believe I have ever met any women like them, for they seem to have no vanity at all, but neither do they pity themselves, nor will let anyone speak their minds for them. In the month that has passed, I have once or twice prayed to be ill, so that Hannah and Eleanor might nurse me. But most strangely, given the unhealthy Fenland air and the inadequacy of my meals, I have not been ill one day. I content myself by sitting near them at supper, for I find their stillness comforting.
The sixth member of the Whittlesea staff is Daniel. He is the youngest of them all and his face has that transparent quality of youth – as if only time will give it proper substance. He is no more than seventeen. Having seen nothing of the world, nothing that he sees causes him any fright or revulsion. He is accepting of all things. He does not flinch from what he sees and smells and hears inside William Harvey. And of the six Friends, he is the most accepting of me. There is no disapproval in him. While the others wish to convert me to Quakerism, Daniel does not. Rather, being told that I was once at Court, he asks me to tell him in secret what that world of the Court is and how men speak and how they dress and what things they devise as pastimes. So I find myself describing the game of croquet, and Daniel listens and repeats such explanations as "Red may now, having passed under the hoop, endeavour to roquet Black" with reverence, as if they were the Twenty-third Psalm. And the two of us are momentarily very happy until I remember that I no longer have any rightful place in the world where croquet is played and so would do best to forget its complicated rules. And so I break off and Daniel is, for a mere moment or two, cast down. "Why might we not," he asked me one day, "play a little croquet here, Robert?" I pretend to give this some thought before answering: "The sight of a croquet hoop would make John most unhappy, Daniel."
And so I come to "John", as I must now call my spindly friend, Pearce.
The joy and surprise with which he greeted me were soon enough superceded by a return to the severity with which he always feels obliged to treat me. As I expected, he was neither surprised by my fall from Royal grace nor sympathetic towards my distress.
"When I saw what your life was, in that terrible luxurious house of yours," he said, "I prayed you would be taken out of it."
"Yet I, Pearce, was uncommonly fond of it," I felt obliged to remind him.
"John," he said.
"What, Pearce?"
"Call me John, if you will."
"I am bound, after all this time, to find that difficult."
"You find difficult all that is simple and good, Robert. That is the trouble with you."
This conversation took place in Pearce's room late on the night of my arrival at Whittlesea, I resting my wind-buffeted body on his narrow bed, he lying on a pallet (such as is used by the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell) on the floor. I looked at him – my friend and my refuge! He is thinner than ever he was, so that the bones of his wrists resemble ivory bobbins. He is suffering, here in this low-lying land, from a very thick catarrh which causes bubbles of spittle to keep bursting at the corners of his mouth and which has quite silted up his sinuses, so that his voice sounds as if it was issuing from his nose. For this catarrh, he is dosing himself with mithridate which, in turn, has inflamed his eyes. He is, all in all, a wretched sight.
Though Quakers are not fond of sermons, Pearce lying on a straw mattress and dribbling mithridate into his nostrils, earnestly delivered himself of a sermon upon the perfidy of the Stuart Kings. "None of them were," he said, "nor none will ever be worthy of the nation's trust. For the good of the nation is never first with them. What is first is their supposed Divinity that puts them outside or above the law, so that in all their actions they are accountable to no one, neither in their public nor their private life…"
While listening to this sermon, I found myself pondering not the truth or otherwise of Pearce's words, but my own absence of anger in the whole disastrous matter. Wounded, disappointed, afraid, melancholy: these I am. What I do not seem to be is angry. So, refraining from agreeing or disagreeing with Pearce's diatribe against the Stuarts, I simply burst out: "Why do I not feel angry, Pearce?"