Restoration

always easier to frighten away the living than it is to frighten away the dead? What do you think, Merivel?' But I cannot remember what I answered.

Chapter Twenty-One. Katharine Asleep

As you will have noticed by now, I have no great gift for solitude. After the death of Pearce, however, a longing to be alone began to possess me.

If I had still had my horse, I would have ridden out of the gates of Whittlesea and turned northwards and gone on until I came to the samphire fields and the dunes and the sea. What I would have done when I got there, I cannot say. Perhaps I would have sat down on a jetty smelling of tar and looked out towards Holland and turned my mind to the King's war for which my house and lands were helping to pay. Perhaps I would simply have sat down and remained sitting until I was mistaken for one of the Idle Poor and sent by an Overseer to a workhouse.

At all events, I could not get to the sea. I walked vainly out along the causeway to Earls Bride, but the sight of this sad place made me turn back. On my return, I had a waking dream of the empty, circular room in the West Tower at Bidnold. It was a dream of a place of light.

I returned to my linen cupboard and lay down on my cot and there was a silence in the house which soothed me for a little while. But then I began to hear all the accusations and lamentations to come, and I put my hands over my face. When I thought about Katharine, I felt cold and sad in all my limbs. She repelled me. No longer did I pity her, even, because it was for her sake that I was about to be driven away from Whittlesea and put back into a world where I had no place. And I had begun to believe that she – no less than those lost to a violent insanity, such as Piebald – was indeed corrupted by devils and that the evil in her had infected me and made me play the beast with her and that when I did these things I was not myself, but a man possessed by Satan. Pearce, by dying, had made me turn aside from my foulness. He had saved me. What I longed for now was to be quite alone with the memory of him; yet what awaited me was Katharine's pleading for one kind of love and the Friends' sadness at my betrayal of another.

I got up off my cot. I went out into the soft soundless rain. I walked to Pearce's grave and stood and looked at the letters of his name which have been burnt into a thin cross made of willow wood which, as the seasons pass, will surely warp and bend and become pale and so start to resemble his actual body. 'John,' I said, 'I do not think that I shall ever find peace.'

Some days after the burial of Pearce, I told the Friends, at the end of a Meeting, that I was ready to speak about the sins I had committed, but I requested that I should be allowed first of all to talk to Ambrose privately. There was some opposition to this, it being the Keepers' belief that secrets are very venomous things, 'likely to bring illness and even death to any group or corporate body where they are permitted to breathe.' But they had seen how greatly I had been affected by Pearce's abandonment of me and so granted me what I asked, out of sorrow at my weakness.

The parlour fire was lit, the autumn evenings now seeming chill. Ambrose seated himself before it and I knelt on the hearth rug like a penitent, warming my hands.

Though very filled with a nervous sickness, I began to speak with a strong voice. I told Ambrose that it was in my nature to be immodest and lecherous and how, as a young man, I had neglected my work at St Thomas 's to go in search of women in the park and take them back with me to my rooms at Ludgate. 'My fall from the King's favour, the very thing that made me take the road to Whittlesea,' I said, 'was caused by lust. Though I had promised never to lay hands on my wife, my desire for her became so great and importunate that I could not stop myself from trying to touch her, thus making myself utterly ridiculous, causing her a deal of distress, and bringing the King to a great fury. So you see, Ambrose, that this greed I have to possess women has been a bitter enemy to my prosperity and indeed to my reason. There have been times when, recognising this, I have found myself lamenting the fact that women had ever been created!'

I paused. Ambrose nodded. This nod of his made me want to ask him whether he had ever had a similar thought, but I did not, it seeming very unlikely that this immovable crag of a man ever suffered the torments of this kind of temptation.

'When I came to Whittlesea,' I went on, 'I believed that all of what I had been in my former life I would no longer be. I thought Whittlesea could re-make me.'

'And has it re-made you, Robert?'

'It has re-made parts of me. John understood this when he told me I had made 'some progress'. And perhaps – though he never spoke of it – he knew that I would be tempted by Katharine and that I would resist, but that eventually my resistance would falter.'

'And if he had seen it falter, he would have felt betrayed by you Robert.'

'Betrayed?'

'Yes. For it is understood by the Keepers of Whittlesea that we stand towards those we protect as parents towards children. And for the parent to lay any hand on his child for his own pleasure and satisfaction is a betrayal of the most horrible kind.'

I sighed. I was forced to admit to myself that this was indeed how I had thought of Katharine and it was for a 'child' that I had made the doll, and thus the Time of Madness with her now appeared to me more foul than ever and Ambrose's sternness with me entirely justified.

I had not seen Katharine for several days, having been asked by Ambrose to stay out of Margaret Fell. He now described to me how – since my betrayal of my trust -Katharine could not be induced by any means, save the giving of laudanum, to sleep and how, day and night, she repeated my name and asked for me and shrieked and sobbed and touched herself indecently and how my very name had become synonymous with her madness so that the women of Margaret Fell told the Keepers she was suffering from a 'lunacy of Robert, a most terrible derangement.'

This description made me feel so afraid that all strength went out of my voice and I longed to curl up into a cowardly heap at Ambrose's feet (remembering for a fleeting moment that I had once lain thus before the Royal footstool) and be covered by absolute silence and darkness. Aware of my fear no doubt, Ambrose reached out and put his large hand on my shoulder.

'I know,' he said, 'that you are sorry for what has happened. We love you and we forgive you, Robert.'

'Thank you, Ambrose.'

'But I also know that you will want to make amends, and it has come to me from the Lord how you are to do this.'

'It has come to you from the Lord?'

'Yes.'

'What has He said? What am I to do?'

'You are to leave Whittlesea.'

'I know. I knew that I would have to do this.'

'But not alone. You are to take Katharine with you.'

I looked up at Ambrose. I swallowed. I put my fists together and held them out in an attitude of supplication. 'Ambrose,' I began, 'please do not ask me to do this…'

'I am not asking. The Lord is commanding.'

'No! He would not…'

'Did He not hear you say that if you could cure one of them and see him walk out from here you would feel useful again?'

'Yes. I said that – '

'And He heard you. And now He has made it possible for you to achieve the thing you hoped for.'

'But Katharine is not cured…'

'Not yet. But the means have been found. You have found them and only you hold them. The means are you.'

'No, Ambrose!'