take the tray away and fetch pen and ink and paper instead.
What I wrote – although I do not have the paper before me, having been instructed to give it to Ambrose – I can remember very exactly, for it was perhaps one of the shortest wills ever made, Pearce's burning coals having diminished, as it were, to a mere few cinders. He bequeathed all his books, including his Bible, to Whittlesea House. His clothes – those threadbare garments that he wore without the least tremor of embarrassment or shame – he offered 'to the inmates of our Hospital, so that they may put on the garments of a true Quaker and be tender towards each other', and the ladle he left to me, 'this fragile thing perchance being of comfort to him sometimes.' And this was all. The last line I was ordered to write stated that 'John Joseph Pearce, Quaker, possesses of his own no other thing or things upon earth.'
When I had written down everything (in the careful script I am capable of if I take extreme care with the position of the quill in my hand) I gave the paper to Pearce and helped him to sign his name. I made no comment upon his gift to me of the ladle, being so saddened and troubled by it that for a short while I could not speak. When I found my voice again, it was to offer Pearce a taste of the green pear, which he declined fearing, he said, that it would give him a pain in his teeth.
Since the night when Pearce had called out to me on my return from Margaret Fell, I had not visited Katharine. I had made a bargain with God: I would not touch her nor let her come near me again if He would give me Pearce's life.
I knew it to be a futile thing. I knew that Pearce was dying. Yet I kept to it. And Katharine, finding herself abandoned by me, came up to the house from the Airing Court and beat on the door with her hands and screamed out for all the world to hear that I was her lover. And that night, the ninth night of Pearce's illness, I and the Keepers sat quietly at supper, they looking at me sadly but saying nothing until the end of the meal when Ambrose spoke. 'When the time is right for Robert to speak to us,' he said, 'then he will speak to us.'
And I nodded. And we all rose and began to clear away the plates and dishes.
They knew that I could not leave Whittlesea until Pearce was gone.
He died in the quiet time between the Night Keeping and the dawn of the eleventh day.
I was with him, alone.
I closed his mouth. I took up his thin, white hands and folded them across his chest. And into his hands I put the ladle.
'Look,' I whispered to him, 'the ladle will not be taken from you.'
Then I closed his eyes. And I sat down. And it was then that I was aware of the silence, and I knew it would be there for ever, and that whenever I thought of my friend or spoke to him in my mind, I would hear it again, and where before there had been answering words or messages of guidance or sniffs of disapproval, there would henceforward be only this: the Silence of Pearce.
I sat on the hard chair, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, and cried. I did not try to stem my tears nor mop them up with any handkerchief or striped dinner napkin, but let them fall onto the floor and onto my thighs and run down my legs.
When I looked up again, there was a milky light at the window and Ambrose and Edmund and Hannah and Eleanor and Daniel were there with me in the room, standing by the bed with their palms pressed together in prayer.
A coffin was made for Pearce that day by two men from George Fox. It was too large for him, but we put him in it and packed his body round with branches of pear.
We held a wake in the parlour and this wake took the form of an all-night Meeting, during which, as and when we were moved to do so, we spoke of him or said prayers for his soul.
I tried, without saying any words, to gather into me what I could remember of his wisdom and what came to my mind was his despair at the greed and selfishness of our age which he believed was like a disease or plague, to which hardly any were immune, not even the poets or the playwrights, 'because, Robert, even the creative spirit is whoring, and Piety, the mother, has given birth to Luxury, the wanton Daughter…' And these thoughts comforted me a little because through them it came to me that the things which Pearce had loved about the world had been so few – the tenderness of Quakers, the wisdom of William Harvey, the memory of his mother, the growing of trees
I was trying very hard to imagine him in Paradise (I have frequently tried to envisage my parents here, but all my mind is able to conjure up is the Vauxhall Woods and I am inclined to doubt whether, if Paradise exists, it would resemble a place where Londoners go to have picnics), when Daniel suddenly said: 'It has come to me from the Lord that John Pearce taught me many things by the example of his life and the greatest thing that he taught me was never to be blinded by affection, because it was his way to judge most harshly those he loved most, and so his loving of them never hurt them but only helped to strengthen them.' I looked up and saw that Daniel was looking at me, and Ambrose, too, glanced at me, as if the two of them were waiting for me to speak.
I felt very hot, just as I had at the Meeting where I had suggested the story-telling and the dancing, and so I suspected that some words were going to come out of me, but did not know that when I spoke them they would reveal to me something that I had not, until I uttered it, understood. I wanted to stand up, but my legs felt very weak, so I continued sitting down and then I said: 'In the silence which has fallen since John died this morning, I have listened and waited. It is as if I have been waiting for some word, not from John, nor from God, but from myself to myself and now it has come…'
Still, I did not know precisely what the supposed 'word' was or what I was going to say next. I paused and took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow, and then I said: 'In this quiet, I have understood one thing. And it is this: that all my love for women which, before I came here, was a very trumpeted and tempestuous thing, and even all the love I thought I had for my wife, Celia… all these loves were mere deceptions and not love at all, but only vanity and lust, for which I am ashamed. And in all my life I have truly loved only two people on earth, and these two are John Pearce and the King.'
At the shock of hearing the King's name put beside Pearce's, all the Friends raised their eyes and cast upon me their sternest looks. I opened my hands in a gesture of helplessness, 'You will straightway say,' I continued, 'that my love for John Pearce is worthy and my love for the King unworthy and that I should, as indeed John often told me, cast it out from me. But it seems that I cannot. For whatever I do and however far I travel from my former life, I still find it there. But it is no longer a greedy love. It asks nothing. It is like the love for a dead man; it is like my love for John. For I will see neither man ever again. I will never be with them. All I understand tonight is that these two people I have truly loved – wisely in one particular, unwisely in the other – and that no one else on earth has ever counted as these two have counted with me. And for this knowledge, which may have come to me from the Lord or from some other place, I feel grateful.'
The flush that had come into my face and body subsided after some minutes, despite my awareness that the eyes of all the Friends were still upon me. The air was very close with their displeasure and I expected them to start speaking out against me. But they did not. And I imagined each one of them wrestling with his or her anger and conquering it for the sake of quietness and for the sake of John.
And so the night went on and became morning and at six o'clock, we drank some chocolate and ate some biscuits which seemed to me to taste most strangely of charcoal.
Towards midday of the tenth of September, Pearce was put into his grave and the yellow clay of Whittlesea packed tightly around and above him. I had made certain that the ladle was put into the coffin with him before the lid was nailed down.
But at the graveside I found myself remembering how, at Cambridge, some cunning thieves calling themselves 'Anglers' had tried to steal it and all Pearce's possessions from him. They worked with a long pole, on the end of which was a hook made of wire, and such a pole had been thrust through Pearce's open window one night while he slept. He had woken up to see a chair moving in a glimmer of moonlight three feet off the floor and floating out through the window. 'It was only,' he told me, 'when the pole came back into the room and I saw it move towards my ladle that I understood there were villains at work and not ghosts. And so I cried out angrily, and my shouting frightened them and they ran away.' He laughed when he had told me this story and then he said: 'Perhaps it is
