'How shall we keep the channel, Sir, in the dark, and not stray onto shallows or be splintered to pieces by a lighter or a barge?'
'There is a three-quarter moon,' I pointed out, 'and no cloud. We shall see our way tolerably well.'
'We shall be as cold as corpses by the time we get there!'
It was plain to me by now that Fox (as I christened the tilt-man) had no desire to take me on this journey, but, remembering that in this new age most things can be had by bribery, I offered to double his fare from two shillings to four. I settled myself comfortably under the little canopy, and we embarked on the evening tide.
Why did I wish to go to Kew? Now that the effects of the Drops had worn off entirely and I was once again capable of rational thought, I knew that I must give some attention to what the King had told me concerning Celia. For reasons which I could not completely comprehend, I felt exceedingly uncomfortable with the message I was instructed to convey. Something within me wished, for the first time in my life, to disobey the King. Why? I really did not know. Far from purging me of all hope, the event of the morning had proved to me that the King's affection for me still endured. What he had said of Celia, however, his hand gesturing with the pestle, seemed designed to convey to me that, beyond mere lust, he had no feelings for my wife at all, and that his restless spirit would very soon tire of her. In going to Kew, then, in hoping to see (all shuttered and dark as I knew it would be) the house he had given her, I believe I had it in mind to try to measure his love for her and, according to how the scales tilted, decide upon the message I would take home to Bidnold. The notion that one is able to guage the quality of one person's love for another by a moonlit glimpse of a house got from a tilt-boat is, I freely admit, preposterous. And yet there is no other explanation for the journey my heart was suddenly so determined upon. Did the King love Celia, or did he not? In the company of Fox and with a light breeze ruffling my jabot and cooling my overheated face, I believed myself to be gliding towards my answer.
Fox, once settled to the task, rowed strongly and well. Binding some threadbare cloth about his neck to protect his scrawny gizzard from the coming night, he pushed me onwards, past the Temple and its arched gate, then on past the crammed acre of Whitehall where in almost every room and chamber lights appeared to be burning and my ears caught for one fleeting moment the sound of an oboe.
By Whitehall and beyond, the river, even at this evening hour, was still noisy, the quantity of small boats making the water slap against the landing steps and the gruff shouts of 'Next oars!' from the bargemen putting me in mind of the barkings of a drill sergeant trying to marshal into some semblance of a line a disorderly platoon of fops.
Past Westminster, as the Thames took a southerly turn, it quietened and on our left side I saw begin the dark mass of Vauxhall Woods, where, as an angelic child in my little moire suit, my parents liked to take me on picnics and rambles. 'If you are quiet, Robert,' I remember my father whispering, 'we shall presently come upon a family of badgers.' But I fear that I was never quiet enough, for I do not recall ever seeing a badger in my life until one was brought to the dissecting laboratory at Caius and I saw at last the clownish markings of the animal, by which my father had been so touched.
'Tell me,' I said to Fox, 'are there still badgers in these woods?'
'Yes, Sir,' answered Fox, 'I heard tell you can see them there. If you are quiet.'
I said nothing to this but, as we glided on towards Chelsea, I fell to wondering why I am so attached to noise. Even discordant noise (my own singing and my first disasters with
The moon was up now and fattish and by its light we rounded the bend to Chiswick Meadows. Not far from Kew, I turned to Fox and enquired of this old river-rat: 'They say the King keeps a mistress at Kew and is sometimes seen by you watermen skulling upriver to visit her. Is there any truth in this story?'
Fox spat into the water.
'I saw him once,' he said.
'Can you be certain that it was he?'
'Certain.'
'How might you be able to tell?'
Fox spat again. Perhaps he was a Puritan and a Commonwealth man.
'It were morning,' he continued,before dawn even come and nothing much moving on the river. I, Sir, I were taking cherries from Surrey to vendors at Blackfriars. Half light it were. Four o'clock in summer. And I saw this thin skiff coming on with a man very tall in it and his cloak cast aside and in this fine golden coat, and I says out loud, 'That's one man in the Kingdom and one only!'
'Did you wait and watch? Did you see where he tied up?'
'More than that, Sir. I sold him some cherries.'
'You did? So you saw his face close to, and it was he?'
'He all right. Gave me a penny for the fruit from a little jewelled purse.'
'And you saw him land?'
'Yes.'
'Could you show me the place?'
'Not in this dark, Sir.'
I cleared my throat. 'My excellent man,' I said. 'As I predicted, it is not dark at all, with that large moon up.'
'Darkish, Sir.'
'Nevertheless, please try, if you will, to remember the place and point it out to me.'
We glided on. My face, that had burned for so many hours, was cool now and my hands were beginning to feel a trifle numb. Cold as I was, I felt inside me the heat of trepidation and anxiety. At any moment, I would see Celia's house. And then, as we turned and headed back against the wind and the tide, I would have to make up my mind…
I instructed Fox to steer the boat towards the north bank and to slow it. I offered to take the oars while he concentrated upon his task of remembering, but he would not entrust me (quite reasonably) with so precious a piece of his livelihood, informing me instead that he could row from here to Spital-fields blindfolded, and in so doing utterly negating his badinage about lost channels and collisions with lighters with which he had wheedled from me two poxy shillings. Dependent upon him as I was, however, I could not afford to show any anger. We crept forward in silence, turning once and retracing our route along some thirty or forty yards of bank and then going on further till at last Fox spied, in the cold, glimmering light, a small wooden jetty with steps leading up to it from the water.
'There's the place,' he said, 'that's she.'
'Ah,' I said, 'but there's no house.'
Fox shrugged. 'It's there,' he said.
I had him tie up to the jetty. With some difficulty, I clambered out of the small boat (now earning its name by tilting riotously the moment I stood up) and made my way along the landing stage. A pretty iron gate guarded a narrow path running between squat bushes I took to be hazels and hawthorns. At this moment, the moon disappeared behind a cloud, plunging me suddenly into blackness. I stood still, waiting for the moon to reappear. Though behind me I could still hear the slapping of the water, I had the illusion, for a moment or two, of having lost my way.
I walked cautiously on, aware of the night around me, some scuffling animal in the dead leaves, a night bird putting forth a little stuttering cry.
And then I heard music.
Moments later, as the clouds once again uncovered the moon, I found myself in a small knot garden and before me stood the house. It was not grand or large. Its principal rooms seemed, from the size of the windows, to be modest. It is, I thought on the instant, the kind of small house I would give my daughter, were I to have one. But I could not dwell long in my mind on its size, because it was clear to me now that one of the rooms, from which came the sound of a harpsichord and a flute, was full of people. Lamps and candelabra had been lit. On the window seat, a man lolled with his arm round some pretty wench's neck. A musical supper appeared to be in full swing. As I stood and breathed and tried to warm my hands by rubbing them together, I heard a sudden flight of
