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?"
"John."
"John. Why do I not feel angry, John?"
"Because you are a child."
"I beg your pardon?"
"A child, punished by selfish parents, does not feel anger. It goes to its little private corner to weep. Exactly as you have done. And if the parents should again hold out their arms, why then the child will come running into them, all glad to be returned and forgiven for something it did only in answer to their greed."
"But Pearce – "
"Just as, if the King were to call you back, you would go running!"
"He will not call me back. It is quite finished."
"No. But were he to do so, you would go. And this is how it is revealed to me that you are still a child, Robert. But, mercifully for you, your state of homelessness brought you to Whittlesea. Our task here is to cure you of childishness just as we are trying to cure the lunatics of their insanity. For the man in you could be most splendid, Robert. I saw the shaping of the man – before you reverted to being the child – and it is that man we shall restore to you."
I glanced down at Pearce. I noticed that by him on the floor, within reach of his cadaverous fingers, he had placed his precious soup ladle. And I smiled.
After that first night, I found that Pearce was not interested in discussing my past life or my loss of it. He wished me to put it out of my mind, as speedily as possible and so from the following day (during which I was given the drab clothes I have described for you) I was expected to join in the work of the Keepers exactly as if I were one of them and a born Quaker.
"Robert is well qualified to help us," Pearce announced to Ambrose, Edmund, Hannah, Eleanor and Daniel over our dawn breakfast of barley and water porridge. "He is not squeamish or frail. He claims to have forgotten medicine, but I know that he has not. So let us give thanks to Christ that He has sent Robert to us and ask Him to sustain him in the work we shall find for him to do."
There followed prayers of touching simplicity. "Lord, send a light to show Robert the way," said Ambrose. "Dear Jesus, be with Robert," said Eleanor. "God in Heaven, take Robert's hand and be at his side," said Hannah. "And even when night comes, still be at his side," said Daniel. "Amen," said Edmund.