Restoration

in the saddle bag was a letter from Will, which ran as follows:

Good Sir Robert,

It was a mighty joy to me to get a word from you and know you are in London, where God keep you safe from the Plague.

I am sending a Boy with your mare, she has been galloped a little every day and fed good hay so do not fear we have put her out of our mind.

I can report this same bad Pestilence is come to Norwich where most terrible for all. Except, on getting a smell of this news, the Viscomte de Confolens has gone back to France and is no more seen here, which is not terrible but mighty excellent, for I and M. Cattlebury we did Detest and Loathe him. Pray he will not return.

We are glad your life goeth on and we send you our blessings for your little girl Margaret which is a name well loved in my family and in all Norfolk I do think as well.

Your servant, Wm. Gates

Having read Will's letter which – as his letters always do -made me remember him very fondly and brought to my mind my easeful life at Bidnold of which he had been a part, I was impatient, suddenly, to get up on my horse and be reminded of what it was to ride about the streets, instead of tramping through the mud and dirt of them on foot.

I rode first to Shoe Lane, to the little dark shop of an engraver that I used to pass when I had my rooms in Ludgate. I went in there and ordered to be made a small brass plaque with the words R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. chased into it.

I then remounted and turned Danseuse round and put her to a pleasant trot. And, trotting all the way, we went along Blackfriars and crossed the river at Southwark Bridge and so came in a very short time to the house of Rosie Pierpoint.

I will not deny that what followed was very pleasant. If I had once believed that my desire for Rosie had been snuffed out by the loss of other, more precious, things, I now saw that, after all that had passed, its vital flame still had a little breath.

While I have become thin on Quaker porridge and widow's stews, Rosie has prospered and grown fat and the sweet dimples above her bottom are deep and when she smiles there is a fold of flesh under her chin. And these things delight me.

She told me that, since the plague came to London, there has been 'a craze for washing and for the boiling of pillowcases in lavender water' and that she could not remember a time when her business had 'blossomed out more.'

No longer did she eat meals of fish and bread: now, she was able to buy chickens and pies from the cookhouses and cream from the dairies. She worked hard but, as a reward, she spoiled herself. She believed that her fires and her cauldrons of perfumed water and the good food she ate kept her safe from the plague 'for it is the poor and the cold who die from it, Sir Robert, and not the likes of me.'

We lay in her bed all afternoon and I told her the decision I had come to, which was to set up in London as a doctor and surgeon once again and to make my living in this way and no other. And she sat up, leaning on her elbow, stroking the moths on my stomach with her fat little hand and said, 'Everything, then, will be just as it once was, before you went to Whitehall,' and I was in no mood to contradict her, so I nodded and replied, 'Yes. As if the time between had not existed.'

I left her towards evening. As she put a wet farewell kiss upon my mouth, she told me that the King had returned to London. 'But take care,' she said smiling, 'that you do not go near him, for you do not want your life to go round in a circle!'

I did not go near him. Of course I did not.

I borrowed two shillings and ninepence from Frances Elizabeth to pay for my brass plaque and I nailed it to her door, under her own sign, Letters Written.

As the summer came on, the plague appeared to be dying down and, because people believed that it was leaving them, they had no cause any more to despise the physicians. And so the sick and the hurt of Cheapside and its neighbourhood began to come to me – some sent by my old apothecary friend, some because they had seen my sign, and some cast upon my doorstep by the tide of rumour and gossip that washes through the coffee houses and the taverns.

Most often, I would be fetched by some relative or neighbour of the sufferers and so would treat them in their homes; sometimes, they brought their wounds or their pain to me and there was no other place to receive them and tend them than the parlour, so that in time it became an operating room like those we had had at Whittlesea and Frances Elizabeth, chased out of her letter-room by Finn, was now deprived of her parlour by me. Even now, she did not complain. She bought a little escritoire and put it in her bedroom and wrote her letters there, her hand and her phrasing becoming more and more elegant and assured as time passed and her fear of solitude diminished.

On Tuesday afternoons – as was my old habit – I would visit Rosie and we both grew very comfortable with this arrangement, neither of us wanting more from the other than these few hours could give. I no longer gave her money, but I would take her gifts of food: a dressed capon, a jar of mincemeat, a pat of butter. And sometimes we would eat a little supper together, sitting at her table by an open window and listening to the sounds of the water.

'You can hear the noisiness of it,' she said one evening, 'coming back.'

It was coming back everywhere. It was as if London had decided to chase away death with laughter. In the coffee houses, Finn found a great clamouring of people ready to pay twenty or thirty shillings for a portrait, because they believed in the future again and could even foresee a time when these same portraits would hang in the houses of their grandchildren on grander walls than any they would ever live to own. And so they came, one after the other – merchants, barristers, schoolmasters, drapers, cabinet-makers, clerks – and sat where I had sat, near the empty ink-wells of the letter-room, and Finn gave them their immortality on stolen canvas. I watched them go out with the finished pictures and no matter how coarse were their features I saw them softened and made glad by this image of themselves that they held in their hands. The next stage was that they would send their wives, to have a twin portrait hanging the other side of the fire. And when Finn saw that this was happening, he fell into his old ways of wanting more than he had and so the price of the pictures went up to thirty-five shillings and then to forty and then to forty-five.

One Tuesday evening, I returned home to find a third plaque on the door. Elias Finn, it read, Portrait Painter to the Rising Man. When I went in, I found him drinking Alicante with Frances Elizabeth and he was dressed from neck to foot in new clothes. Apart from the shirt and the shoes, they were all green, even the stockings. 'Ah,' I said,. 'I see you have been back to Sherwood Forest.' But he only smiled thinly. The thin smile said: 'The day for those old jokes has long gone, Merivel.'

I can report to you that during this summer of 1666 I began to feel comfortable with my life, for the first time in a very great while, as if it and I were once again in step. When I am old, I shall remember it: The Time of the Three Plaques Upon the Door.

Then there was a June morning that came and after that morning almost all of this comfort that I felt went away.

It was a Sunday. I woke very early. I looked out of my window and saw that the sun was not yet up and I had (I really cannot say why) a sudden desire to see it come up over the river – something I had not witnessed for a great while.

I dressed and crept down the stairs and went out. The streets were silent. I heard the bell of St Alphage toll four o'clock. The air was cool, almost cold, and I began to think that, after all, there would be no visible sunrise. Yet I walked on. And when I came to the water, I sat on some little steps where tilt-boats and barges land their passengers and waited. Lying on the river was a white mist, so thick that I could not see the further bank.

The sky began to lighten and now I could see that there were no clouds in it at all and that, but for the mist,