Restoration

So, in the cold February light, we began to play, the King placing himself, as of right, in the service court. I noticed that the net had grown in splendour, being, in my time, a mere piece of string but now an ornate braid hung with tassels.

No sooner had one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber installed himself in the marker's box than the King dealt me a most brilliant service that seemed to flutter by me almost before the ball had bounced, as if we were playing not with wads of hair and cloth but with a flight of wrens.

I remembered from a previous time that, although His Majesty likes to win at tennis, he does not like to win easily. He likes a fight. He likes the other man to run and run and never give up. What I tried, then, was to put out of my mind all knowledge of my recent illness and to play as nimbly as a lizard, scuttling forward and back, chasing every shot. Unfortunately, all out of practice as I was, my play was most horribly wild and inaccurate, one of my balls flying straight at the marker's box and smiting one of the Gentlemen in the eye, another going so high that it soared up and over the penthouse roof- to bounce, perhaps, at Will Gates's feet as he sat and digested the carbonado and waited for his first glimpse of his Sovereign.

My play was, in short, very lamentable and we had concluded but three games when I found myself feeling most horribly sick, my mouth suddenly filling with bile. I dropped my racquet, so that I might kneel for a moment on the pretence of retrieving it. I took some great breaths of air. Then I heard the door to the side penthouse open and I wondered all at once whether Celia had come to preside over the contest and smile her sweet smile upon the King's certain victory.

But it was not Celia. It was a footman come with lemon juice and sugar for us. 'Lemons from Portugal in February!' said the King. 'Grown under glass especially for my dear Queen.' So a little respite was granted to me, albeit indirectly, by that placid and good-natured woman who seemed to be so often absent from the King's thoughts. I believed her to play no part in my story at all, yet on that day she undoubtedly saved me from casting up my meagre dinner onto the stones of the tennis court.

To my immense relief, I was able to win the fourth game. I was on the service side now. From the left-hand section of it, I managed one strangely brilliant service and three sliced shots to the tambour which the King adroitly retrieved but then pitched the ball under the net. In the next three games, however, such strength as I had had drained from me. Sweat poured down my face, mixing with the powder with which I had hoped to cover the ravages of my measles. I could not run any more, but only stagger. Shot after shot sped past me into the dedans or the winning gallery. Never send to know, I thought, for whom the bell jingles. It jingles for thee, Merivel. And then I thought of Pearce, whose favourite poet John Donne is. And I asked Pearce to remember me now and give me strength to face all that was still to come.

'As I foresaw,' said the King at the conclusion of the set, 'you have become slow.'

'I know, Sir…' I mumbled.

'Very slow. And the game, of course, is a fast one.'

I followed the King into the garden where I had left Will and where he still stood in his grey leggings. The King walked at such a swift pace that I had to scurry to keep up with him and had no hope of getting his attention to ask him to turn upon my servant, however briefly, his majesterial glance. But I could not afford to worry too greatly about Will. I knew that my beating at tennis was but the preliminary to a more bitter scourging.

I was led into a little summer-house, not unlike the one at Bidnold where I had briefly attempted my secret oboe lessons with Herr Hummel. The place was swept and clean, but in the fading light of the winter afternoon a somewhat chilly habitation. I put on my black and gold coat. The King blew his nose then turned his face towards me. So close was he to me that I could see clearly the fine lines that gathered at the corners of his eyes and at the edge of his lips. It seemed to me that he had aged since my last meeting with him in his laboratory and the observation distressed me, as if I had believed that in a changeful world the King alone was outside the reach of time.

'So,' he said at last, 'you did not play by the rules, Merivel.'

'In the tennis, Sir?'

'No. Not in the tennis. With regard to your wife.'

I looked down. I noticed that there was blood in my shoe, but did not know from what part of me it could possibly have come.

'I do not know what rule I have broken, Sir,' I said quietly.

'I am surprised. Why were you chosen as Celia's husband, Merivel?'

'Because you knew that I would do anything you asked of me.'

'That is true of very many people in our Kingdom. No, it was not for that. It was because, at one of our earliest meetings, you told me the story of the visible heart you had seen at Cambridge. You told me you knew that your own heart had no feeling whatsoever. And I believed you. Yet now I see that I should not have done, for it is by no means true.'

There was a long silence. Silence, when one is in the presence of the King, seems a most fearful condition, and I felt hot and faint.

'Love was not asked of you, Merivel,' the King said at length. 'Indeed, it was the only thing forbidden you. But so soft and coddled and foolish have you become, you could not see that in the breaking of this rule you would, like old Adam, drive yourself out of Paradise.'

'Out of Paradise?'

'Yes. For what is your role now? You cannot play Celia's husband any more because she refuses to set eyes on you ever again. Thus, in trying to be the thing you were charged with pretending to be, you have rendered yourself useless.'

I looked out at the afternoon dusk that was settling upon the garden. Near a stone bench, I could make out the shadowy figure of Will, who, when darkness descended, would find himself lost.

'I had not intended…' I stammered, '… to love Celia. I loved her voice first, her music. And I do not know how this love was transformed into a love of another kind. I do not know how.'

'It happened because you allowed it, Merivel. You became futile. You had too little work and too much dreaming time. And then you indulged your dreams. You thought you could re-cast yourself. Voila tout. And now you are no more use to me.'

The King looked away from me, and for a moment I thought these words signalled my dismissal. But they did not. He had more to say to me yet.

'Happily for you, Merivel,' the King continued, 'I have enough affection for you to wish to make you useful again, if not to me, then to the people. I fear it will take some time, for look at you! How wretched you have become! But we must try, must we not?'

'Yes, my Liege.'

'Very well. Then hear what I have in mind. I am, for the time being, content with the arrangements of my own life. Celia is returned and appears to have learnt some wisdom -perhaps from you, although I doubt that this is so and she certainly denies it. At all events, she is returned to Kew and I am happy that she should be there. But in most other matters, I am not so fortunate. I have the impression that the 'honey-moon' of my reign is over.'

The King again turned a little from me, so that I saw his face in profile and was struck, not for the first time, by the length and fineness of the Stuart nose, which is so very unlike my own. I was about to suggest that the King's love affair with his people would surely last as long as he lived, but before I could speak he cut me off.

'I lack money,' he said. 'We are engaged in a war of trade with the Dutch, yet I lack the means to fit out our ships. This poverty is a foul humiliation, Merivel, and must be remedied. I have been too generous, too profligate with gifts of land and estates. But now comes a reckoning. Now comes a time when I must pay attention to arithmetic.'

And so at last the King came to it, to what he called his 'arithmetic'. He was taking Bidnold from me.

He was 'repossessing' it, just as he had repossessed Celia. For, like Celia, it did not belong to me. All that I owned had come to me from him and now he was taking it back. Some French nobleman would purchase it from him, house, lands, furniture and all, and the money thus acquired would be used to buy hemp and tar and sailcloth and rigging. Bidnold would thus 'become useful' again. Land would be translated into ships by the King's arithmetic and those ships would be ships of war.

And what of me? How, dear Lord, was I to be made useful again? By being forced, now that I had no land, to