Restoration

laughter.

All the way back to Lambeth (where I intended to lodge for the night at an inn called the Old House) I pestered Fox, telling him he must have been mistaken. 'Either,' I said, 'it was not the King whom you saw or else he did not tie up at that jetty.' But his rodent features were hard and set, as was his mind, he informed me. He vividly recalled the ease and grace with which the King tied up his skiff and climbed out of it ('as if he had been a very waterman, Sir') and he insisted that there was no similar small jetty for another half mile upstream or more.

At the Old House I dined well and fell into conversation about the art of marble cutting with a likeable fellow from the Navy Office who recounted to me that the marble-cutter's life hangs in its entirety upon patience, for though the mass of stone that confronts him may be as large as a four-poster, he can, with his little tool, cut a mere four inches a day.

Pondering such steadfastness and perseverance and wondering if I would ever be capable of it in regard to my painting, I all of a sudden remembered, with a surge of bile to my stomach, my pledge to Violet Bathurst to spend this very night in her bed.

I had a dream of a drowned body. I was at Granchester Meadows with Pearce and a group of medical students and we sat on the banks of the weedy Cam and we saw this lumpen corpse come floating towards us. We had but one thought: we must retrieve the body for our anatomical studies. We took off our coats and lay on our stomachs and reached out and took hold of the swollen limbs. And then I perceived that the body was Celia's. Her hair streamed among the waterweed and her mouth was blueish and open, like the mouth of a fish. I was about to cry out to my fellow students to let go of her arms and legs when I woke. I was shivering and my throat was sore and my nose full of mucus and my thirst had returned.

I lit a candle and stumbled to the wash-stand in the unfamiliar room in the Old House and gulped some water and then got into the bed and tried to warm myself, but the dream of drowned Celia frightened me so much that I was afraid to sleep again in case it returned to me, as dreams are in the terrible habit of doing.

'God is the engineer of all dreaming,' Pearce once announced to me. 'He fills the sleeping mind with all we have neglected.'

'Tosh, Pearce!' I said at the time. 'For the great part of my dreams are about food. My nights are pleasantly filled with rabbit fricassees, venison pasties and chocolate syllabubs, none of which I have in the least neglected.' If I remember rightly, Pearce then made some acidic rejoinder about God giving me a vision of my own gluttony, which I utterly ignored, but now the idea that this dream of drowning had been 'sent' to me seemed entirely plausible. For, so confused and dismayed had I been by the sight of Celia's house filled with people and music (indeed as if the poor girl was dead and all memory of her drowned) that I had 'neglected' to decide what I was going to tell her and in my conversation about the marble cutter had managed to put all thought of her from my mind.

So I lay and shivered and nursed the ague that had come upon me so suddenly and tried to weigh the whole matter in my mind without consideration for myself and in a detached and proper manner, as if Celia were my patient and I not I, but some wise Fabricius, some unparalleled physician utterly unprone to error.

By the time dawn broke and I permitted my snivelling self an hour of soothing sleep, I had come to the following decisions:

I would return to Celia and inform her that the King appeared to have forgotten her, that it was rumoured some new mistress had taken up residence at Kew, that he had expressed very forcefully to me his displeasure about her importunate behaviour but had not given me to believe that he would ever summon her back. I would then counsel her – exactly as Pearce had counselled me – about the folly of hope. 'If,' I would say to her, 'you permit yourself to hope, you will come to insanity, Celia, and then I cannot tell what will become of you. Perchance you may come to poor Ophelia's end, drowned in a stream.' I would explain to her that I had at last understood of what element the King was fashioned: 'He is mercury,' I would say. 'He is of that same metal he spends hour after hour in his laboratory trying to extract from his flasks of cinnabar, but which is ever elusive and restless and cannot be fixed and held. And how will it profit any man or woman to love mercury?'

What I could not foresee was how I was to find any remedy for Celia's grief. I knew myself inadequate to the task. I was not Fabricius. I was not even Pearce. I had no wisdom.

This ague of mine, got no doubt from the extremes of heat and cold through which not only my body but my mind had passed in the preceding night and day, forced me to remain in my truckle bed at the Old House for an entire week.

When my fever worsened and I began to detect in my groin and in my neck some slight swelling, terror filled my heart. Plague was coming and where might it arrive more swiftly than to the malodorous Lambeth marshes? For more than fifty hours I imagined myself dying. I wept and cried out. I beseeched my poor burned mother to intercede with God for me, knowing my own prayers to be unheard. 'Dear parents,' I heard myself say in my delirium, 'make God the gift of a hat. He is fond of plumes. Give Him a fine hat in exchange for my life!' I ranted and blubbed. My cowardice was as infinite as a well sunk from Norfolk to Chengchow.

Then on the third day, my fever lessened and my swellings began to go down. To the poor serving woman who brought me broth, I declared that I had been resurrected, which statement she read as an out-and-out blasphemy and quickly made the sign of the cross upon her bosom.

Still somewhat weak from my illness I took a stage coach to Newmarket, where I spent the night. At dawn the following morning, I was reunited with Danseuse and gratified by the little whinny of delight with which the mare greeted me. I am most fond of animals. I enjoy about them, in equal measure, that which is graceful and that which is gross. And they do not scheme. No man, woman or child exists in this boisterous Kingdom who is not full of plotting, yet the animals and the birds have not one good ploy between them. It is for this reason above all others, I suspect, that the King is so attached to his dogs.

Danseuse galloped home like a chariot horse, her spirits far out-distancing mine on this return journey. Though I clung to the reins and pressed my knees ardently to her sides, she unseated me near Flixton and as I lay winded in a ditch I suddenly perceived, not far from me, an old wrinkled woman lifting her hessian skirts and pissing onto the brambles. It amused me and I would have bid her good-day, except that I had no breath within me.

I struggled upright at last and remounted Danseuse, who was foraging for grass in the frosty lane. I tried to persuade her to trot sedately for a while, but she would not and we arrived at last at Bidnold in an unseemly sweat.

My clothes being frankly filthy and full of stench, I was in no mind to talk to Celia until I had soaked for some hours in a hot bath and put on clean linen. I called at once for Will (who reminds me sometimes of a small, nimble animal in his unquestioning loyalty to me) and within a short time I lay at my ease in a tub, regarding the moths on my stomach, while Will poured more and more hot water round me and I told him of my stay at the Old House and how Death had come into the room and laid an icy hand on me and caused me to snivel like a baby.

'If plague does come to Norfolk,' I said to Will, 'I shall try to show courage, but I am bitterly afraid it will be the false courage of a desperate man and not the true bravery of one whose mind and spirit are at peace.'

Will shook his head, about to flatter me, no doubt, with his erroneous belief that when the hour approached I would conduct myself like a Parfit Gentil Knight, but before he could speak we heard suddenly the most lovely sound of a viola da gamba, coming, it seemed, from beneath us in my Music Room.

I sat up, causing a small tidal wave to splash over the rim of the tub. 'Will,' I said, 'who is playing?'

'Ah,' said Will, 'I was about to inform you, Sir Robert: your wife's father is come.'

'Sir Joshua?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Sir Joshua has come to Bidnold. But why, Will?'

'I do not really know, Sir, except or unless it be to take your wife home.'

'Take her home?'

'Yes.'

'You heard that mentioned?'

'Yes, I did, Sir. That as soon as you were returned, they would leave.'