Restoration

embroidered slippers that she now also cradled to her and to which she sometimes spoke, as if to a child.

She was sitting up and looking over to where I stood. I did not go to her. I waited. She put down the slipper she had been holding and got up and came towards me. I saw the woman lying next to Katharine wake up and stare at her and then at me, but I paid this other person no heed at all.

As Katharine came close to me, I reached out for her with my left hand and with my right hand I opened the door to the operating room of Margaret Fell where only a short while ago I had helped perform an autopsy and wrapped a dead woman in her winding sheet.

The floor of this room is stone and on this stone I knelt down and pulled Katharine down by me and kissed her mouth and then her breasts. And both of us tore from the other our clothes, being very full of greed and readiness. And naked together we crawled into the dark space under the operating table. And there, it seemed, Katharine imagined herself once again above the vaults of a church, for she began to whisper to me that at last we were together in God's house. And though God may never forgive me for this, I confess I was excited by this blasphemy, and I did with Katharine in the space of an hour everything she asked of me and more that my own mind could devise. And this was no simple Act of Oblivion, but a love of the most Profane kind.

Chapter Twenty. John's Ladle Almost Taken from Him

This night began what I now call my Time of Madness at Whittlesea.

There had been a Time Before. In the Time Before, as I have shown you, I believed that all my dealings with the Keepers and with the inmates were true and honest. I did not dissemble. I took out my lost skills from the darkness to which I had consigned them and laid them at the service of the community. I had been renamed and I strove to become worthy of that name. And if the old Merivel sometimes reappeared, sighing over his lost past, he also tried to make himself useful, as on the afternoon of the tarantella. As Pearce said of my oboe playing, it was evident to all that I was 'making progress.'

That 'progress' could not continue after I entered the operating room of Margaret Fell with Katharine, for from that moment I became addicted to my own foulness so entirely that my mind, instead of contemplating the work of each day, was filled up with it and I entered willingly on the most terrible deceptions just to come to it again.

When I woke, on the morning after that first night, and remembered what I had done, I felt mortally afraid. I knelt down by my bed and confessed to God: 'I have suffered a contamination of madness and now I am unclean and full of the Devil, but I will not do those things again, if you will help to drive the Devil from me!'

When I went down to breakfast in the kitchen, Hannah remarked that I looked pale, and I admitted to the Friends that I did not feel well that morning, it proving very difficult for me to swallow the porridge set before me, or even to hold my spoon because of a trembling in my hands.

I did not shun the work of the day, however, which included an airing for the inhabitants of William Harvey – always a most difficult and lengthy task, for before they can be brought out into the air all of them must be washed, some of their own excrement. And as the day progressed, the fear and shame by which I had been overcome upon waking gradually went from me and were replaced by a most acute longing to go into Margaret Fell and seize Katharine roughly by the hand and push her before me into the dark room and begin again on the shameless acts I had promised that morning to renounce.

And so began the pattern of each day during the Time of Madness: each morning, I vowed I would never, as long as I lived, touch Katharine again nor let her hand seek me out; each night, I lay and waited without sleeping for the moment when I could slip out into the darkness and go to find her.

It was soon known by the other inhabitants of Margaret Fell what kind of acts we performed in the operating room and the women would sometimes cluster by the door, listening, and when we came out some of them would claw at me, at my mouth and at my sex, and beg me to take them also. And this longing that they had and their knowledge of what I was doing made me feel very sick and afraid, for I knew that sooner or later some behaviour or word of theirs would betray me to the Keepers and I would be sent away. I was deceiving Pearce (perhaps for the first time in my life, for I had never before pretended to him that I was leading an honest life when I was not) and I was deceiving Ambrose and the others, who had taken me in and tried to make me one of them. But more terrible, perhaps, than either of these deceptions was my deceiving of Katharine who, finding herself in love with me, asked me to swear that I was in love with her and that, if the day came for me to leave Whittlesea, I would take her with me. And so I swore. But the truth was that I did not love her at all. Pity had drawn me to her, and my own lust, suddenly a most overpowering and demented thing, kept me there with her in the darkness. And when I asked myself whether, in time, I would grow to love her, I knew the answer: the possibility of my growing to love Katharine was as remote as the possibility of Celia growing to love me.

I had gone on, undiscovered in the Time of Madness, for about five weeks when, returning one night to my room near one o'clock, I heard a voice call out, 'Merivel!'

I stood on the landing, shivering a little, certain that Robert had been found out at last and was being summoned as Merivel to be given his punishment. I waited and the voice called again, 'Merivel!' And then I recognised it as Pearce's voice and I moved slowly towards his room.

I opened the door. He had lit a rushlight by his bed and was lying on his side with his face very near the taper and he held one of his thin hands out towards me, palm upwards, in the gesture of a beggar.

'John,' I said, 'what do you want?'

'Merivel…' he said again, and his voice sounded thick with his old catarrh, 'I was waiting for you…'

'Waiting for me?'

'To come in. I heard you go out and I waited for you to return, so that I could call you and not wake the others.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I go and walk in the air sometimes at night, if I cannot sleep…'

'I heard you.'

I went nearer to Pearce. I know him so well that I can discern anger on his lips before he has uttered a word and I looked hard at him to see if it was there or not. It was not there, and the relief I felt was very great. What I could see, however, as I approached his bed, was that his face was running with sweat and that his cheeks (usually of such translucent whiteness it is difficult to believe that Pearce spends any of his time in the open air, let alone a great part of his day hoeing and pruning in his vegetable garden) had a hectic bright redness to them, the two things announcing to me at once that he had a high fever.

I went to him and laid my hand on his forehead. My hand burned.

'John…' I began.

'Yes. Very well. There is some fever. I was about to tell you that. I did not call you to repeat to me something I already know.'

'Why did you call me, then?'

'I called you because…'

'What?'

'I cannot find my ladle. I think it has fallen and rolled under the bed.'

I knelt down and felt about in the dust under his wooden bed, but could not discover it. I moved round and round the bed, searching under it as far as my arm would reach, but the thing was not there.

'I cannot see it, John.'

'Please find it, Merivel.'

'Why do you call me 'Merivel'?'

'Did I call you that?'

'Yes.'

'When in truth you are… who? I cannot for just this one moment remember your other name.'

'Robert.'

'Robert?'

'Yes.'

'And yet tonight, since this fever began… that name Robert seems to have slipped away from my mind and what I remember is Merivel and how we once together witnessed a very miraculous thing and that was a visible