Restoration

'Love is the means, Robert. If you love her, she will sleep and when she has learned to sleep she will no longer be mad.'

'And besides, she is yours entirely now, for she is expecting your child.'

That night, I did not sleep.

What passed through my mind I cannot remember. All I know is that I was filled with a dread of the future so profound that all my life until that moment appeared to me to have been filled with a happiness I had never perceived. When George Fox first heard the word of God, coming directly to him, he declared that from that moment 'all the creation was given another smell under me than before', and now I felt as he had felt, except that he had begun to smell the newness and freshness of things and what I had begun to smell was despair.

When Ambrose told Edmund and Eleanor and Hannah that 'Robert is not shirking his responsibility towards Katharine,' they were very tender in their behaviour, smiling sweetly at me and promising to pray for me. Only Daniel looked at me sadly. 'It's a shame,' he said, 'that you were never able to teach us the game of croquet.'

During the days that remained to me at Whittlesea, I tried to decide what road I would take when I went out from there, whether north to the sea or north-east to Norfolk or south to London, but I had no appetite for any journey nor for any arrival; I was filled with a loathing for my life. And so I chose the road to London, remembering the plague there and imagining that in the pestilence resided the ending of my story – an ending I had brought upon myself.

The Keepers fetched Katharine out from Margaret Fell. They bathed her and washed her and combed her hair and put a clean dress on her. And they gave her Pearce's room to sleep in, promising her that I would come to her and comfort her 'with the tender love he feels for you and the child', and that, so comforted, she would indeed sleep.

And so I was forced to go in to the room where my friend had died and there was Katharine sitting quietly on the hard chair where Pearce used to sit and read, his knees neatly together, the book held up to his nose, like a fan, the words of Harvey circulating so sweetly in his brain that it became oblivious to everything else.

When Katharine saw me, she rose from the chair and came to me and put her arms round my neck and began to sob and say Robert, Robert, Robert, twenty or thirty times. I held her. The dress she wore was made of clean linen and so the smell of Katharine was not the smell of her that I remembered. And for this change I was grateful.

I told her that we would be going away from Whittlesea. I told her that I loved her and that I would not abandon her.

That evening, she supped with us in the kitchen. She ate with a spoon in her right hand and with her left hand kept a hold on my arm. And that night, as Ambrose and the others had predicted, she went to sleep and did not wake till dawn.

The money that remained to me in the world was twenty-four pounds and three shillings.

With this, with my clothes and possessions put into two flour sacks, and with Katharine dressed in a woollen cloak waiting for me outside, I stood in the parlour of Whittlesea House, in the room of all the Meetings, and the Keepers came, one by one, and took my hand and bid me adieu.

The sorrow and disappointment that I beheld in their faces was a very terrible thing to endure and I wished for this leave-taking to be over quickly. But it could not be so, because there was a corner in each of their hearts that did not want me to leave and would rather have had me stay, my crime notwithstanding. And so they reminded themselves how the Lord had sent me to them 'out of the windy sky', and how, in coming to Whittlesea, I had brought a great gift and that was the gift of my hands, which had helped them for so many months in their tasks of healing.

'How shall we manage?' asked Ambrose. 'Now that mine are the only physician's skills? Pray for us, Robert, for life will be hard for us – without John and without you.'

'Yes. Pray for us, dear Robert,' said Hannah.

'And pray for me,' said Daniel, 'for if ever there is to be more dancing or skipping about, I will be the only musician.'

'I will pray for you all,' I said, 'and remember you for ever, how you took me in and how it was never part of any plan that I had to betray you or make you ashamed…'

When Eleanor came forward to take my hand, as she spoke the words, 'The Lord keep you, Robert,' her eyes filled with tears and she looked down at my hands in hers, as if they were something precious to her.

'Do not cry for me, Eleanor,' I said. 'Please do not cry for me.'

But she shook her head. 'We will all weep for you sometimes, Robert,' she said, 'just as we will weep for John. For you are both lost to us.'

So I walked out of the parlour for the last time and then out of the house and the Keepers came and stood in a cluster by their door and watched me go.

A cart had been hired for us. I threw my flour sacks onto it, then I took Katharine's hand and helped her up and got in beside her. I told the driver of the cart, a lumpish man with the fat buttocks of a woman, and his hair tied in a greasy bow, to make haste. I wanted to be gone now and not to look back. But the cart-horse was sluggish. We proceeded almost at a man's walking pace. And so, before we had gone very far out of the gate, I did look back. I turned and saw it all: the iron door with its inscription from Isaiah, where I had first gone in, the three great barns named by the Keepers after people who were sacred to them, the house that had contained my linen cupboard, outside of which the Friends still stood and watched me, and, beyond the walls, the cemetery where Pearce would lie for all eternity. On the day I had arrived there, I had believed myself the unhappiest man on earth. Now I knew that my unhappiness then was as nothing to my present sorrow, so that everything that I could remember about my time at Whittlesea seemed touched with a comforting light, as if it, no less than my time at Bidnold, was part of the day and what was falling upon me now was the night.

The actual night overtook us on our cart as we entered the town of March. I paid the man off. I knew I could not endure the sight of his fat rump for another day. He deposited us at an inn called The Shin of Beef and we were given a room that smelled of apples, a quantity of them being stored in it on damp trestles.

I knew we were in a poor place, badly run and neglected, but Katharine, having been out of the world for so long, believed it to be grand. She thought the apples had been put out for us to eat (there being no supper available to us, not even the poor cut of beef after which the miserable inn was named) and so she ate them greedily, one after another, until she vomited up a mess of them into the bed. In the cold of one o'clock a maid no older than twelve or thirteen came and took away the foul sheets and put on some that were clean but damp and in this cold dampness Katharine clung to me and kissed me and some of the devils that were still in her came into my blood on her saliva and so I took her at last but with my eyes closed, so that I could not see myself or her, and with my hands covering her face. And with her breasts pressed against my back, she went to sleep. But I could not sleep, for the cold and smell of the place and for the great choking of misery that was in my heart.

We were forced to wait in the town of March for two days for a stage coach that would take us to Cambridge and so on to London.

On the first of these days, a Tuesday, a market began setting up at dawn outside our windows and so I took Katharine out and we walked among the stalls selling honey and fruit and candles and skeins of wool and beeswax and we found a man who, for threepence, would imitate the cry or growl or squawk of any animal or bird. And this person mystified and delighted Katharine so much that I was forced to keep paying him money for one imitation after another and soon felt very foolish standing in a gawping crowd and listening to a man pretending to be a chicken and a hog and a capercaillie and a new-born lamb. After almost a quarter of an hour, I said to Katharine:

'We have heard enough now. Let us move on before he begins on all the beasts of Africa,' but she begged me to let her hear one more thing and said: 'You have not chosen any animal or bird yet, Robert, so now it is your turn.' And so I took out another three pennies from my purse, and the man held out his leathery palm for them and said: 'What is it to be, Sir? A screaming peacock? A howling wolf? Or – two for the price of one – an old sow and her suckling piglets?'