So, endeavouring to put from me the devastations of the recent time, consigning to darkness the smell of the King's perfume, the sound of Celia's voice, the touch of the King's hand upon my nose, the sight of my own lust on my starlit roof, I looked at my remembrance of Pearce very closely, as it might be through a microscope, allowing that which had become invisible to be seen once more in clear definition. In this way, I prepared myself for my journey.
For my decision to go to the Fens ran some way ahead of my ability to do so. In short, no sooner had I said the word "Pearce" out loud than I knew myself to be afraid. My friend's company I knew would be beneficial to me; the company of a hundred lunatics could afford me nothing but pain. Thus, I tarried at the Leg. From the ghosts by the trout stream, I begged courage.
The date of my setting forth was the tenth of March.
I passed the first night at Puckeridge and the second in Cambridge, where I took myself to Caius and stood on the dark stairway outside the room that had been mine. From inside the room came the sound of soft, serious voices. It occurred to me that none in that room, however studious they might be, could know that the organ of the heart has no feeling.
On the third day I rode on towards Willingham and I saw how the landscape became, as it were, less and the sky more and how the creatures most numerous were the birds, who had their existence in both elements. A wind got up, making Danseuse nervous, so that she became for a while a dancer indeed, shying at gusts. But the birds rode on the wind. I watched them glide and plummet on the eddies. I saw bustards, and dottrels and wild geese.
And I observed how, in this Fen land, the crust of the earth appears thin, allowing water to seep and ooze upwards so that it is possible to imagine there are fishes and not worms in the soil. And it is a landscape of thin things – feathery marsh grasses and bullrushes and bending willows – so that I smiled when I thought of Pearce within it, thin and threadbare, and I also began to sense how I, with my wide, flat face, my fleshy lip and my soft belly, was not at one with it at all.
Though the wind seemed unable to cease (as if the vast cloudy sky held the wind trapped, as under a dome) no rain at all fell on me in all my journey and for this blessing I found myself giving thanks to the silent God of the lardy cake. And so in this way let my thoughts dwell upon the very simple credo that informs Pearce's life and which makes him immune to all the spells under which I had fallen. Despite much evidence to the contrary, he and his Quaker friends believe that the Apostolic age is not over, that God and his Son have much more to say to us yet, but will not choose persons of worldly authority through whom to say it. "The Seed of Christ, Merivel," Pearce had informed me many times, "is planted not in the souls of Priests or Kings, but in the bosom of The Commonest He," thus causing whole hundreds of proud citizens to quail with fear at the idea of God's word passing through the likes of Cattlebury or the late Pierpoint and so to denounce Quakerism as an utter heresy. Strangely, the King (who does not appear to quail at anything, even death) is tolerant towards Quakers – more tolerant of their discourtesies than he has been towards mine. Were Pearce to come into the King's presence and refuse to remove his hat, I do not think he would have his house taken from him. I could imagine, even, that the brazen gesture might be rewarded with that gift I once held to be more priceless than any other, the Royal Smile.
So, with my incoherent thoughts turning always in a circular fashion back towards myself, I trotted on towards the village of Doddington, and stayed my third night in the little town called March, where I slept a most disconsolate sleep, being full of trepidation about my imminent arrival at Pearce's Hospital.
The New Bedlam, or Whittlesea Hospital, has been founded in a place with the poetic name of Earls Bride, but which I saw at once to be really no proper place at all, but a thin straggle of poor cottages, having no forge or ale house or dairy or any means that I could see of purchasing provisions. It is like a drowned place, a shipwrecked place. Those few who cling to it must endure a life of most fearful monotony, their only visitors being the birds and the buffeting wind. Upon my first sighting of Earls Bride (is there the ghost of a true bride in the name or has it corroded in the damp air, being once Bridle Way or even Bridge?) I had this most perverse thought: that the penning up of one hundred lunatics in their midst had brought some entertainment to the inhabitants of this God-forsaken place.
As we approached the Hospital, which is a cluster of barns built around a lime-washed low-roofed house such as might house a yeoman farmer, Danseuse stopped dead and, though I kicked vigorously at her flanks, she could not be persuaded forward. I dismounted and looked about me and listened. I could hear nothing except the huffing of the wind, but I note in passing that, since my meeting in the King's summer-house, my hearing seems to have suffered a most inexplicable loss, and I could tell from Danseuse's stubbornness and from the way her ears were pricked that she had heard a sound that made her uneasy.
Around the buildings has been constructed a flint and clay wall, like a bailey round a castle except that this structure was, I presumed, designed not to keep enemies out but to keep the mad folk in, lest they go roaming about in the flat land and drown. An iron gate had been let into the wall and it was towards this that I led Danseuse, having put a comforting arm round her neck.
The gate was locked. I knocked and waited and then turned and looked at desolate Earls Bride on its little causeway. It was the look of one who, suddenly feeble of spirit, wishes to turn round and retrace his steps homewards. And I know that, had Bidnold still been mine, I would have done this. I would not even have stayed to greet my old friend. I would, in short, have run away.
A tall man, large in every respect, with a great barrelled thorax and very mighty hands, opened the gate to me and stood smiling enquiringly. He had red curly hair, very thick and abundant, and a red beard, under which he made a steeple of his fingers.
"How may I help you, Friend?" he asked.
I nodded to him, the while noting a distressing shivering in the neck of my horse.
"I have come to see my friend, John Pearce and… well, in truth I really cannot say why else I find myself here, unless it is in the belief that I could be of some use…"
"Please enter. We will get oats for your horse. It is not a glad place you have come to, but a place of suffering. I expect you noticed our words from Isaiah upon the gate?"
"I saw some words, but did not read them."
"Ah. Then read before you come in."
The large man now returned his hand to the gate and pushed it to a little, as if making to shut me out. Had he closed it entirely, I do believe I would have turned my horse round and cantered away, but he did not.
I peered at the inscription beaten into the metaclass="underline" "Behold, I have refined thee but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction" Isaiah 48.10.