Restoration

find myself very touched by what they have to say, so that I want to laugh. And this feeling of suppressed laughter is the nearest I have come for a long time to happiness.

I always wear my wig for Meetings so as to spare John and the others the sight of my hogs' bristles. There is a tidiness about the way they arrange the chairs that I don't wish to spoil. With the wig on, however, and with one of my coats (usually the black and gold, not the red) replacing the leather tabard, I resemble very nearly the Merivel of my former life and invisible under this old finery is the Robert of now. He is present, nevertheless. He is grateful for the warmth of the parlour fire and for the voices of Hannah and Eleanor which are so gentle and soothing that, when one of them is speaking, he sometimes finds himself asleep in his chair. But the one great trouble about Quakers is that they are bossy: they do not let you dream.

Chapter Sixteen. The Scent of Flowers

The winds have gone and the air of April is still and quiet and warm. In the Airing Court, the big oak is putting out leaves of a green so succulent it brings saliva into my mouth. I do not precisely wish to eat these leaves but yet want to posses them in some way before the newness of them vanishes.

It has not rained here for some time and through the yellow crust on the mud of Whittlesea new grass is springing up and in the ditch outside the wall there are primroses and violets. Pearce seems most entranced by these flowers, as if he had never seen nor smelled any like them before. Not only does he pick them and examine them; I have observed him lie down on the edge of the ditch and stick his nose into a clump of primroses and not move for ten minutes at a time. I know from the vacant look in his blue eyes that his mind is at work on some experiment with regard to the flowers, but I have not asked him what it might be lest he infer from my interest in the thing a renewal of a more profound interest in biology.

Hannah and Eleanor are in the habit of thanking the Lord for giving us 'kind weather', but I have come to the conclusion that to me such a springtime is cruel; in it I feel wanton and idle. I would prefer a return to hard skies and a clamped chill, these being a better accompaniment to the routine of my day, which is a most harsh one that affords me no leisure at all, but rather commits me to many hours of work of the most demanding kind I could imagine, namely work with my scalpel.

There is, adjacent to each of the main rooms of George Fox, Margaret Fell and William Harvey, a small ante- room, lit with oil lamps, in which patients are examined and cures and operations tried upon them. Before my arrival, Pearce and Ambrose were the only two physicians among the Keepers at Whittlesea and so to them fell the task of trying to alleviate madness with the knife. Now, I have been forced by Pearce to 'render service to Whittlesea by placing such skill as you possess in the service of the common good', or in other words to join in the cutting and blood letting and to do it without complaint, for Pearce's eye is always upon me, watching and measuring. He knows very well how I recoil before this return to my former vocation. He knows also that were he and the other Friends to put me out from here, I would be at a loss to know in which to direction to ride.

Mercifully, I have not yet been required to perform any large operations, but there is, by those who study insanity, a great faith put in phlebotomy, and this we undertake daily. The degree of suffering felt by a man who must have his head held over a bowl while a scalpel opens a vein in his temple I cannot calculate, but if I am the one who must make the incision I always feel obliged to apologise to him beforehand, and often feel tempted to add (yet do not): 'Forgive me, for I know not what I do,' for since coming to Whittlesea I have seen not one cure worked by a phlebotomy. As well as from the forehead, we let blood from the cephalic vein and many patients bear in their arms wounds that have been reopened so many times they will not close. Ambrose says of the cephalic phlebotomies: 'In the bright blood let by this means, I can smell the choler!' His faith in medical science is no less complete than his faith in Christ and with regard to both practices I know him to be an honest and honourable man. But I can perceive no miracle cure in the opening of the cephalic vein. Invariably, the patients (even those who are violent) are quiet for some hours after the cutting, but soon enough return to their habitual state, the pain of their wounds surely adding to their other sufferings? In short, I am somewhat critical of the methods we employ here. We spill blood and with its flow believe we release poisonous humours, but do not know beyond all question whether we do or not. I remain silent, however. For it can avail me nought (do you note the biblical cadences into which my language has fallen?) to condemn a thing when I have nothing better to put in its place.

I have noticed, however, that there is one shortcoming in our modes of treatment, which are based upon the unspoken thesis that lunacy is a liquid thing, which may, drop by drop, or in a sudden heaving torment, be coaxed out of the body in streams of blood, vomit or faeces. I do not know whether or not lunacy is a liquid thing but, were it to be so, I would try natural as well as unnatural means of bringing about the body's excretions. And this we do not do. I would cause the lunatics to weep (either with laughter or with sadness, it would not matter) and I would cause them to sweat. For the first, I would tell stories; for the second, I would play music and let them dance. Yet neither tears nor perspiration are encouraged. With those who do cry we are stern, telling them to cease their wailing and remember Jesus who never wept for himself, only for the sufferings of others. And of course there is no dancing. The only exercise taken by the inmates of our Hospital is the passing of the shuttle through the warp of the loom, the turning of the spinning wheels and the slow shuffling round the Airing Court. And this overlooking of two beneficial evacuations of nature has begun to worry me, so that it keeps bobbing to the surface of my mind. It bobs up, in truth, so frequently and persistently that I may soon be forced to disturb Pearce's reverie with his primroses by revealing to him my thoughts upon the subject.

Word that I was once at Court has reached the inmates of William Harvey. How it has traveled there I do not know, unless the hand of the King may still be felt in the ice of the scalpel blade. As Pearce has stated, most of those in WH have no remembrance of the word 'Court', nor could imagine what manner of thing a Court might be. But there is one, calling himself Piebald, a mutineer on the Valiant Queen, who now takes great delight in telling me that all men on earth with a rank above midshipman are bringers of pox and pestilence and suffering, and should be slain – as he single-handedly slew three officers – 'to rid this England of the stink of privilege'. Because I was once a 'Court Prick', he includes me among those he wishes to kill, and each week he devises a new means of death for me, death and violence being all that occupy his mind, day and night.

And at night, alone in my linen cupboard, I can sometimes feel mortally afraid of this Piebald. Yet quite often during the day I find myself lingering in his pen, his ways of death being so ingenious that I find solace in them for my imagination. That I do this is, of course, most strange. Yet I find myself wondering, do many men of a cowardly disposition not secretly long to meet face to face that other who, without fuss or deliberation, will instantly take their lives from them? Is it uncommon to feel glad to have found him?

Piebald, My Redeemer

This evening, after the Meeting, I took up a piece of parchment to my room and wrote in a pretty script these blasphemous words.

On the morning of the twenty-first of April, finding myself once again staying awhile in WH to listen to Piebald, then noticing, on emerging from the place, that Pearce was walking across the Airing Court holding a bunch of kingcups to his nose, I came suddenly to the conclusion that we two might ourselves be going mad and that it would be possible to recognise in our behaviours – mine with Piebald, Pearce's with the flowers – the first footsteps of our madness. And no sooner had I addressed this possibility than I came stumbling upon a truth about the fate of the insane which had hitherto remained hidden not only from me but I believe from all the Keepers at Whittlesea. And it is this:

The man who is merely ill will seek out, at the first sign or 'footstep' of that illness, the services of a physician to help him to a cure; the insane man, on the contrary, is not taken into any Bedlam or Hospital until his 'disease' of madness is so far advanced that it may be beyond cure. In other words, though illness may be arrested early, madness never is – for the only reason that all men learn and know what the footsteps of illness may be, but who can say in each or any case what the footsteps of lunacy are?

Though it was almost dinnertime and the smell of broth in the kitchen brought on a little pain of hunger, I