"I cannot…" I said.
"Robert cannot," said Daniel. "Robert is the music!"
"Dance with me," said Katharine again, and she began to pull at me, so that I was nearly toppled from the podium.
But Edmund was at Katharine's side now, having seen what was happening to me.
"Come," he said to her. "I shall show you a proper tarantella." And she let herself be led away.
"Save us from this, Daniel!" I whispered.
And he smiled that smile of his which is like the smile of a child.
So we began on the dance. The heat of the afternoon and fear of the failure of the venture made us play it as fast and urgently as we had ever done and, as we entered upon the second rondo of it, I began to have cause to give thanks to Ch. de B. Fauconnier, whoever he may have been, for he had indeed written a strange and stirring piece of music. As we neared the end of it, I whispered to Daniel that we should recommence and keep on because I saw that it held the attention of almost everyone assembled and that in their uncoordinated ways they were struggling to move about.
We played the tarantella five times without stopping and the sweat poured down my forehead and stung my eyes so that the scene in front of me became shimmery and lit with a strange bright winking light like the étincellement of a star. But I knew by the end of the fifth tarantella that everyone was moving, trying to spin and whirl and clapping their hands and some trying to sing and some wailing and some shrieking like the devil.
I have never seen nor heard nor been any part of any thing that was like this hour. And when it was over and we stopped playing and wiped our faces, I felt for the briefest moment of time that I was no longer merely myself, no longer Merivel, nor even Robert, but joined absolutely in spirit to every man and woman there, and I wanted to make a circle with my arms and take them in.
That night in William Harvey, Pearce and I, at the hour of the Night Keeping, found a dead woman.
The clamour and agitation in WH was terrible to witness and I knew that the music had caused it.
As we covered the dead body, on whom, Pearce informed me, we would perform an autopsy the following day, I said to him, "For two or three we have helped in George Fox and Margaret Fell we have sacrificed one here." He nodded. "None of us," he said, "gave this sufficient thought."
We administered a dose of belladonna to every inmate of WH who allowed himself to swallow it (Piebald spat his into my face) and left them to a misery that none of them had words to express.
It was a great relief to come out of WH and to go into Margaret Fell where, notwithstanding a very strong stench of sweat, there was a feeling of calm in the place and we saw at once that all the women were sleeping. Katharine, alone, was awake. She was sitting up and holding the doll to her breast – which was naked and out of her torn robe – as it might be to suckle an infant.
"Stay with her a few minutes," said Pearce, "and I will go on to George Fox. It's getting towards morning and your tarantella has made me tired, Robert."
It was my vow, these days, never to be left alone with Katharine. Ambrose and Edmund had helped me to see what harm I had – all unintentionally – done to her by causing her to feel for me an affection (a love even?) that I could not return. Since understanding this, I had stayed more aloof from her, sometimes getting Hannah or Eleanor to take over the task of rubbing her feet and once telling her that I was too busy to stay and listen to the stories of her past.
On this night of the tarantella, however, I did sit down beside her and took her feet in my lap and began rubbing them, being once again very moved by her condition of sleeplessness.
She sat quite still and watched me. After a few moments, she set her doll aside, then slowly, with a self-caressing hand pulled aside her nightgown and exposed her other breast to me. She licked her lips and regarded me, and in her exhausted eyes I could discern a slow, sleepy, all-enveloping lust. I let go of her feet and made as if to get up, but she reached out and held me, and moved the heel of her right foot up into my groin where, to my great shame and fear, I knew she would find me hard.
I prayed.
I prayed for Pearce to return.
I prayed to God to give Robert the strength to walk away and not let Merivel do as he wished, which was to lay the madwoman down beneath him.
And after a moment or two, in which I did not move, I heard a voice calling me softly from the door. "Here I am, John," I said. And I got up and followed my friend out into the cool air of four o'clock.
Chapter Nineteen. In God's House
At the back of WH, enclosed by a low fence, is a graveyard. I was not shown this when I first came to Whittlesea, but discovered it for myself soon afterwards. There are at present six graves in it and I have been told that they were dug by the men of George Fox, "one of whom in his life before he came to madness was a grave-digger and can dig a very perfect and neat grave."
I asked Ambrose whether, when a man or woman died at Whittlesea, the body was not given back to relatives for burial in some place that might have once been their home. Ambrose replied that if the relatives came and asked for the dead person the corpse would be put in a coffin and given to them, "but few do ask, Robert, it being the case that very many of those here are deemed by their families to have died already." It was this remark of his, upon which my mind has often dwelled, that has helped me to believe in the death of Merivel and his replacement by Robert. Alas, however, Merivel now and again finds the grave an excruciatingly boring place and clamours to come out of it. I fear he may never be entirely quiet and obedient to death until he is actually buried (here at Whittlesea?) and the only sound to be heard near him is the sound of the Fenland wind in the grasses.
As Ambrose, Pearce and I began, then, on an autopsy of the woman found dead in Willian Harvey, a grave-digging party, under the care of Edmund, set out with picks and spades. The day was once again hot and I saw that as they assembled in the Airing Court, a cloud of flies gathered round their heads. These flies made me feel depressed. In what had remained of the previous night, I had had a dream of Fabricius at work in his little anatomy theatre. He had been in an angry, difficult mood and had told us, his students, that we preyed on his knowledge – having so little of our own – like flies on a cadaver.
Towards ten o'clock, the body of the dead woman was laid on the table in the operating room in Margaret Fell. (There is, as I have told you, such a room in all three houses, but very few operations are performed in that of WH, the noise coming from the stalls of the inmates being too disturbing and distracting.) Ambrose, Pearce and I, wearing our leather aprons, slit open and tore away the ragged clothes that covered her and then we stood silently for a moment, each looking at the body and taking note of what we saw of external wounds and marks.
The woman was old, of more than sixty years, and the skin greyish and wrinkled and the muscles of the limbs and of the stomach seeming wasted and slack. The hair on her pubis was sparse and white and there was some of this same hair sprouting on her chin and on the aureoles of her nipples.
Ambrose began to record all abnormal things he found upon her, such as a red soreness of the naval and a bruising on the area of the sternum and Pearce wrote each thing down. I went to her head and took the jaw in my hands to open it and examine the teeth, which were very black and decayed and reeking of putrefaction, and so I reported out loud on my findings to Pearce. But I was so affected by the sight of the body that I could not refrain, at length, from saying: "Does it not strike you as a most terrible but true thing, that men in this world and age can come by fortune in many ways and have many currencies with which to barter, but that women have only one, and that is the currency of their bodies, and when this is spent they must all, high or low, depend upon the charity of some overseer or other?"