Restoration

over, certain lines, certain scenes, certain arrangements of people and costume and light return vividly to your mind, while the rest remains dark.

The lowly inn returns to me. I see its sawdusted, spittle-stained floor, as I cross its threshold in my purple, white and gold attire to follow the rag-bag cavalcade to Celia's house.

I am hoisted onto a grey horse with bells on its bridle. I have been deeply affected by the sight of myself in my outrageous clothes and my spirit is shouting: Forward! Onward! Go!

The crowd is drunk already and full of lechery and screeching, gallants and peasants messed together, waving gloves and ribbons. I couldn't ask for more delirious company, and, above it, smiling and nodding on my plumes, is the midsummer sun.

Up the hill we go, children running before, a fiddler skipping at my side, his head and hair like a turnip, his tune like a maypole dance. This is a pageant, a play, I tell myself, as I sit on my festooned horse. I am the Player Groom; Celia a Dumb-Show Bride. And yet I am, as we set out, ecstatically happy. I want to embrace somebody – God? the King? my dead mother? – for the gift of this ornamented morning. So what I do, as the house comes into view, is lean down and gather into my feverish arms a dimpled village girl and kiss her and the men whistle and the women clap their hands and the turnip fiddle player shows the black creases of his smile.

The next thing I vividly remember is Joshua Clemence's music. We have returned from church, man and wife. Celia wears my ring on her little white hand. I have placed, as required, a chaste kiss on her narrow mouth. I have given her my arm to lead her out into the sunlight and up the lane to Sir Joshua's house. The feast set before us surpasses in splendour anything I've seen placed on a table, and I attack the food and wine with my usual relish. The King, seated next to my bride, giggles at me and makes an elaborate show of swaddling me in a table napkin. For the second time that day, I am glad Pearce isn't here after all. His abstemious nature would shudder at the number and diversity of the dishes prepared for us. With a quick sweep of my eye, I see fricassees, steamed bass and poached salmon, roast snipe, peacock, teal, mallard and quail, game pies and carbonados, tarts of marrowbone, neats' tongues, venison pasties, baked guinea fowl, compound salads, dishes of cream, quinces, comfits and marzipans, preserves, cheeses and fruits. There are sparkling French wines and strong Alicantes and of course the Sack Posset which will be consumed before Celia and I are flung, in a rumple of ribbons, to bed.

After an hour or so of gorging and toasting ourselves, and with a not unpleasing feeling of sleepiness beginning to quieten the excitement within me, I see Sir Joshua rise, take up his viola, and stand alone before us in front of a little spindly music stand. The King endeavours to procure quiet in the room, but the gallants at the end of the table haven't noticed Sir Joshua and continue with great rudeness to belch and giggle. One of them, I notice with amusement, is vomiting into his hat. Sir Joshua ignores them. He takes up his instrument and, without speech or introduction, begins to play.

I am expecting some sprightly dance, so that we can, if the mood takes us, remove ourselves from the table and break into a little canter. But it is music of the utmost seriousness and melancholy that Sir Joshua has chosen, Dowland's Lachrimae, if my musical knowledge has not misinformed me, and within a moment or two, I find myself overtaken by an unquenchable urge to weep. I stare at Sir Joshua's face, looking down towards his viola, and, layer by layer, in my anatomist's sadness, I peel back skin and muscle and nerve and tendon, until I can see only the white bone of his skull, the empty sockets of the eyes…

I look away. I bury my face in my table napkin. I don't want my make-believe wife to see me crying. I pretend I am choking. I rise from the table and fumble my way out of the room. Tears are pouring from my eyes and I am sobbing like a sick mule. I blunder into the sunshine and throw myself onto the lawn, where I lie down and weep for a full ten minutes.

When I sit up at last and blow my nose on the sodden napkin, I become aware that a man is sitting silently no more than a few feet from me. I wipe my eyes and look at him. It is Pearce.

'What are you blubbing for, Merivel?' says Pearce.

'I have no idea.'

'So,' says Pearce, with his habitual gravitas, 'you are married.'

'Yes. What do you think of my wedding garb?'

Pearce stares at me intently, noting, I presume, the pricelessness of my buckles, the faintly royal air the colour purple lends to the whole ensemble. Luckily, I am no longer wearing the three-masted barque, for I feel suddenly glad that Pearce is there, and wouldn't want, at this moment, to cause any malfunction of his blood vessels.

'It is terrible!' he says after a while. 'I expect it is that which has so unmanned you.'

I smile and he smiles, and I reach out a hot hand to him, which he takes and encircles with his glacial fingers.

Pearce and I take a turn round the rose garden. Two gardeners observe us with stony faces. 'I am the groom,' I want to say, 'you must rejoice with me,' but then I remember the confusions inherent in these words, so I say simply to Pearce: 'If they want to be glum, it doesn't matter one whit to me.' Almost as soon as we have returned to the feast and I have settled Pearce at the table, persuading him to take a few hesitant nibbles at a duck thigh and a sip of Alicante, the King rises and calls for the Sack Posset. So the moment approaches! I watch my wife look anxiously at her Royal Liege. He smiles at her the dazzling Stuart smile, in which half the men and most of the women of our country claim to spy proof of his divinity. Then we all get to our feet and, even before the toast is ended, I feel myself being surrounded by my Court friends, who have begun braying and whooping and banging the table, setting the remains of the fricassees and pies juddering about and bottles of wine tumbling. Then I am hustled, half pushed, half lifted, out of the room and into a long corridor. I hear Celia and her bridesmaids making a giggling progress behind us. Though I am half enjoying this charade, I look forward to returning to the table and drinking more wine and then losing myself in dancing and debauch. But I go on, herded up two flights of stairs, and into a magnificent bedchamber where, with shrieks of gaiety, my clothes are unceremoniously untied and unbuttoned and torn from me, leaving me naked but for my wig, my stockings and my garters. With-a cackle of ribald laughter, a purple ribbon is tied around my prick. I admit that this amuses me very much. I push my friends away, so that I can walk to a mirror and there I am revealed: the Paper Bridegroom. My eyes are red and puffy from my attack of weeping, my moth-covered stomach distended from the quantity of mallard and carbonado I have packed into it, my wig awry, my stockings sagging and covered in grass stains and dribbles of red wine, and my cock tied with a bow like a jaunty gift.

But I have no time to dwell on this arresting image of myself. A nightshirt is bundled over my head and I am led out along the passage to another bedchamber, at the door of which most of the wedding guests are clamouring. When they see me, a cheer goes up, and then a relentless chant begins, as I am pushed forward into the bedroom:

'Mer-i-vel Bed her well!'

'Bed her well Mer-i-vel!'

I enter the room. Celia is sitting up in the high bed. As I am hurled towards her, she averts her eyes, but the guests press in on us, so that we're forced close together, and I am aware, now, of the need to act my part. I put my arms round Celia and kiss her shoulder. Her body is taut and rigid, but she forces herself to laugh, and the company pounce on us, pulling the ribbons from Celia's hair, the love-knots from her wrists and the stockings and garters from my legs. With a final braying, the bed curtains are drawn around us and, though the chant of, 'Mer- i-vel, Bed her well', can still be heard, it begins to grow fainter as the guests move out of the room and make their way back to the feasting tables, where musicians have now begun to play a sprightly polka.

I release Celia from my token embrace and she looks relieved. Absurdly, I find myself wondering whether Pearce has eaten all, or only part, of the duck thigh. I begin to giggle. I know what is going to happen now. The King has planned it with his usual attention to detail, and I find it hilarious. 'Well, Lady Merivel,' I begin to say to Celia, but she's in no mood for even a short conversation with me. Already, she's out of bed and opening the door of the adjoining closet to let in the King who, like us, is now attired in a nightshirt. He is smiling mischievously as he takes Celia by the arm.

'Well done, Merivel,' he says, 'good performance.'

I get out of the bed and the King and my wife get into it.

I go into the closet where, laid out for me, as arranged, is a clean suit of clothes (scarlet and grey, this time), a white wig, a false moustache and a mask. I close the door on myself and start to take off my nightshirt, when I