Restoration

Though shivering very grievously, I stayed upon the roof for a while, as if trying to fill my being with the icy night.

I do not know what time it was when I crept back inside the house. I closed the window. As I walked through the attic towards the stairs, I noticed a sweet but sickly smell which I knew to be familiar, yet I could not remember what it was.

I have slept a little. How many days have passed now since my birthday, I do not know. I seem to have lost hold of time.

I had a diabolical dream. Finn, naked but for a green singlet, made love to my wife up against a wall. I killed him. I shot him in the buttocks with twenty-nine arrows.

When I woke, I remembered where it had come from, that sweetish smell in the attic: it is the smell of Finn's wig. And so I conclude, he is a spy. Either of his own making, or sent here by the King. There is no doubt he saw all that passed upon the roof, and will report it to Whitehall, thus causing me to appear, not merely silly, but grievously misguided – an opinion of myself I find it most easy to share.

And I enquire of this sottish Merivel: 'How have you arrived at this state of affairs? (You, who thought yourself to be utterly indifferent to quiet Celia, liking only women of vulgar plumage.) Is vanity the key? On your wedding night, the King lay with your wife, while you plunged to oblivion with a village jade; have you, since that night, aspired to replace the Monarch in Celia's heart?'

It is beyond my comprehension. Love has entered me like a disease, so stealthily I have not seen its approach nor heard its footsteps. My mind recognises the folly of it and yet I still boil and burn with it, precisely as with a fever.

To whom or what shall I turn in order to be cured? From his damp habitation, I hear Pearce make a Pearcean reply: he does not pause or hesitate before instructing, 'To yourself, Merivel.'

I am composing, upon paper, an apology to Celia. I have set down that 'certain events occurring upon my birthday so troubled me that my brain was prey to a sudden spasm of madness, causing me thus to force myself upon you so odiously', but seem unable to proceed with my letter further than this, causing me to wonder whether the lies and fictions underlying all human discourse may be a primal cause of the impenetrable silence we hear within our own skulls.

I sit and stare at my piece of vellum. I brush my lip with my quill. My anus aches with a fidgety tiredness, likewise my right leg. My hand upon the paper is chill. I cannot lie to myself about how ill I feel. I conceive the idea that I may be dying and feel cheered by it, releasing me as it does from the burden of declaring myself to be mad. My thoughts, as you will have discerned by now, are in a boiling muddle. To add to my discomfort, I have found lice in my hogs' bristles, which vermin plague me with an unendurable itching. I have instructed Will Gates to prepare a head bath of vinegar and guaiacum, a remedy I patented myself while at Cambridge and for which my fellow students, unwashed and lousy as they were, came eventually to thank me.

Until I have finished and despatched my apology to Celia, I do not wish to be seen by her, so I do not stir from my room, eating my meals off a tray, like a convalescent. I thus have no idea what is occurring in my house – whether my servants are wearing their fur tabards as instructed (Will Gates is not), whether the portrait is nearing its consummation (in the rendering of a Scottish glen, perhaps, bathed in sunlight behind Celia's fair head?), whether Finn has informed upon me to the King. I sense myself to be in danger, but cannot determine from whence it will come. The visage of Nell the witch returns very often to my mind. The welts on my shoulders are slow to heal.

Today, Will brings me a letter. But this is no Royal summons. It is a poor illiterate note, written by one calling himself Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman. The handwriting is so vile and shuddering, it gives the appearance of having been written at sea in a Hebridean gale. The tidings it relates, when at last I am able to decipher it, are dramatic. This is what is says:

Most Kind and honourable Sir,

I write upon request of the widow Pierpoint, who has not the gift of any alphabet.

She begs me to inform you how that her husband, George Pierpoint, Bargeman, was drowned this Wednesday last under London Bridge while leaning from his boat to catch a haddock and falls into the boil about the stanchions and is gone down, lost.

She requires me to say to you she knows you to be a Person of Kindness. She begs you to remember that she must buy coal for her irons and her washing cauldrons or else come to a poor end which may be the Workhouse.

In sum she requests me to ask of you the gift of thirty shillings, in consideration whereof she blesses you and declares you to be a most Proper and Charitable Man.

From A Humble Servant of the Nation,

Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman.

So Pierpoint is drowned! The wise river will hear no more of his knavery and cheating and foul language, but has taken him to her deep. And Rosie eats her little suppers of bread and whelks alone…

I feel momentarily cheered by news of this death. I imagine for a moment the jumping haddock slipping through Pierpoint's rough hands and, as he falls, his barge going away on the current. Aloud I whisper, 'There was no Overseer,' but cannot determine precisely what I mean by this. All I know is that I have no feeling of pity for Pierpoint: I am glad his life has ceased.

In times other than these, it would have been my first thought, upon receiving such a letter, to make my way speedily to London, to press into Rosie's hot hand the money requested and cheerfully usurp her husband's place in her bed for a number of rumpled nights. As matters stand, however, I feel too ill, contrite, confused, lovesick and afraid to stir out of the house. I am shipwrecked here with my passion. In the distance, I can easily imagine I hear guns of a great Man-of-War. I must go to work again upon my apology…

Now, I perceive why I cannot write it. I cannot write it because it must end with a promise I cannot make. I construct the sentence: 'On my honour, I vouchsafe never again, as long as you do not wish it, to touch you or impose upon you declarations of feelings I know you to find most loathsome,' but I know, even as I write, that I will not be true to this. I know that, such is my nature, it will on some future occasion explode with the very words my wife does not wish to hear. I sense the stuff of this explosion already gathering about my heart, like pus. Does an unrequited love, in time, make a corpse of the lover? Shall I see the drowned Pierpoint before I ever lie with my own wife? (How much I despise my own self-pity.)

Sweet Rosie, I write, knowing she cannot read, but desperate at last to speak my thoughts to a friend. I shall send, with this collection of Merivel's ramblings, a Japanese purse containing thirty shillings. The purse itself has some value and is yours to keep or sell as you will.

I am sorry for the drowning of Pierpoint. To die for a mere haddock is most lamentable.

I would journey to London to console you for the loss of a husband except that I appear to have tumbled into a very profound melancholy and unease of body and mind so that I find myself unable to move from my room. Where I stay wrapped in badgers' pelts staring at a grey and solid sky. In short, I am not Merivel, but a mopish phlegmatic and futile person I do not like at all. My old self, though most outlandish, was amusing company. This new man is loathsome. I have asked him to leave and never more return, but there he sits, scratching, fidgeting, blowing his nose, sighing,yawning and doing a little paltry writing. I wish he would get into his grave.

This person – whom I shall rechristen Fogg – recently had a dream of the King, in which His Majesty asked him: What is the First Rule of the Cosmos? Fogg, in his solitude, finds his mind tormented by this question. It adheres to his thinking like a mussel to rock and yet cannot be prised open. Last night, however, on