"Very well," I said. "I have read the words."
The gate moved again to admit me. I felt Danseuse's head push up against my restraining arm and she jangled her bit.
"Please follow me, Friend," said the red-haired man who, I now noticed, was wearing a leather tabard over his black coat and leggings. The tabard was very stained and blackened with use, like a worn saddle. I looked down at my own clothes. I was wearing brown velvet breeches and a brown coat edged only a little with carmine. The lace at my wrists and throat was limp. My own good sense told me that, for all their relative modesty, these garments were not sturdy enough for the days that were coming.
I stepped inside, tugging my horse, and the gate closed behind us. We stood in a kind of courtyard with a floor of cinders, very patchy with moss. A single tree, an oak, grew in the middle of it.
"This," said the man in the tabard, "is the Airing Court. We believe in the healing property of air."
"This is where they walk?"
"Yes. Round the tree and then round again, and so on, round and round, but the tree is not dull. It is a most restless and changeful tree. You see?"
"Yes. And now the spring is – "
"My name is Ambrose Dyer. I should have mentioned this at very first, for names are important with us."
"I am glad to meet you, Mr Dyer."
"And you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your name?"
"Ah. Robert Merivel. Pearce and I were medical students together at Cambridge."
"John. We do not call him Pearce. He is John. And I am Ambrose."
"I believe, to me, he will always be Pearce. As he, in turn, addresses me as Merivel."
"Here, he is John."
"So I must be Robert?"
"And I am Ambrose. Now I shall name for you our buildings. The house itself we call Whittlesea House and this is where we, the founders and keepers, six in number have our rooms and where we eat together. And the three barns or asiles, meaning places of shelter, are called George Fox, and Margaret Fell, and William Harvey."
Despite the trepidation I was feeling, I smiled to myself. Even here, in this lonely place with its one oak tree, Pearce had remembered his mentor, for of course it was true that he carried the great WH with him everywhere in his circulating blood.
"Which barn is called William Harvey?" I enquired.
"The smallest," said Ambrose, "to the left of us, here. Where those very deep into their madness are put."
At that moment, as we walked towards the house, Pearce came out of it. When he looked up and saw me he appeared to gasp for air like a fish. And then, as I predicted he would, he broke into a stumbling run.
That night, I slept on Pearce's bed, with Pearce lying on a pallet on the floor not far from me. My mind seemed to inhabit a place much stranger than the room, so that I did not feel as if I slept but only fell in and out of odd, dreamlike trances. Each time I believed myself to be near to sleep I heard an echo of the King's voice, repeating the same words again and again: "I have refined thee, Merivel. Behold, I have refined thee. But not with silver. Not with silver…"
PART TWO
Chapter Fifteen. Robert
A month has passed. April has come. And it is as if, during this month, since my arrival at Whittlesea Hospital, I have been absent from myself. This morning, however, seeing my reflection in the parlour window I once again caught sight of him: the man you know all too well by this time; the person I asked you to picture wearing a scarlet suit; the Fool Merivel. And I could not prevent a sentimental tenderness towards Merivel from creeping over my skin, causing me to blush both with affection and with shame. It is this tenderness that has led me to continue the story, notwithstanding the dismaying fact that when I passed through the gates of the New Bedlam, I passed from one life into another and thus an ending of some kind has been reached. Under these things you may draw a line: my house at Bidnold, the colours of my park, Celia's face at my table. Neither you nor I will see them again. They have been consumed, not by actual flames, as were my dear parents, but by the fire of the King's displeasure. I must thus imagine them turned to ash, and so must you, for you will not be returned to them.
I have become Robert.
No one at Whittlesea (not even Pearce, whom I must address as John) calls me Merivel and many do not even know that this is my name. I am not even Sir Robert. I am Robert. And this is how you may picture me: I do not wear my wig except at Meetings (these are most strange yet moving things, which I will later describe), I go about my work wearing black woollen breeches and a black woollen shirt which causes a vexatious itching of my nipples. These garments are covered by a leather apron, very heavy, that comes down to my knees.
My boots are low-heeled and of sturdy hide and ever soiled with the mud of Whittlesea, which is like no other mud I have seen, being blackish and slimy and drying – when it does dry – to a sulphurous yellow crust. My belly, grown very fat upon Cattlebury's carbonados and syllabubs, is shrinking on the poor diet of herring, frumenty, spoon-meat and water favoured by Pearce and Ambrose and the other Quakers. Even as a child, I was a mighty eater and the thinness of the food on which I am here forced to live causes me a deal of misery. Two pigeons are roosting in the poplar trees outside the Bedlam gate and I would dearly love to see their plump breasts roasted and set before me on a plate. But such thoughts I set aside, as I must also set aside a yearning (almost perpetual) to saddle Danseuse and ride away from here. For where should I ride to? All paths, outside this place, lead back to the King. This, at least, I have been permitted to understand. And so I remain, having no glimpse of any future.
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".