Restoration

and it is the stare of someone spellbound. He brings the napkin to his mouth and wipes his lips, but does not take his eyes from me.

I bow very low, sweeping my new hat before me and when I come up from this obeisance, I see that the King has risen and moved out from the little table on which his supper has been set and is now walking towards me. At my back, I hear Chiffinch close the door.

His Majesty stops, two feet from me. He reaches out a gloveless hand and puts it under my chin and tilts my face up, examining, it seems, every crease of it and every pore and even the shape of the skull beneath, so intently does he look at it. Then he shakes his head, as if in great sorrow at something, and yet over his face spreads a smile of such infinite kindness that I know on the instant that not one vestige of his anger with me remains and that, even if on the very morrow his mood will again turn against me, on this particular evening, the second of September 1666, he feels for me nothing but affection.

I begin to speak. 'Sir…' I stammer, 'I am so glad to find you well…'

'Hush, Merivel,' he commands, 'say nothing. For as you know, I see it all and understand it all. N'est-ce pas?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Exactly!'

And then he laughs and brings my face to his and smacks a kiss upon my lips and orders me to sit down and eat.

'It's a picnic,' he says. 'This is what I thought we would have: a picnic. We may eat as messily as we please, so go on, Robert, put a chicken on your plate and some eggs and there is a little cold salmon here and Chiffinch will return in a moment, as I have instructed, to pour you some white wine.'

I have no appetite. I tell the King I have been living very frugally and do not think that I can consume an entire hen.

'Well,' he says, 'they are Surrey hens – very noisy while they lived, we are told, and very succulent in their flesh, so why do you not take up a little thigh and taste it and then, as you eat, your appetite will come back to you.'

I do as instructed and, indeed, I do find the taste of the chicken thigh as delicious as any meat I have ever eaten. Chiffinch returns and some cold, fruity wine is poured for me and I sip it slowly and feel its sweetness entering my blood and moving round me, making me feel calm and serene. The noise of the clamouring clocks, of which there are above two hundred, seems to diminish after a little while and it is as if the King, too, has noticed this diminution when he looks up from his food and says: 'Time has waited for you, then, Merivel. As I believed it would.'

I only nod, not knowing what comment I am expected to make upon this statement. The King puts his jewelled hands into a finger bowl and rinses them and wipes them on his napkin and continues: 'So that now you can teach me something instead of being my pupil: you can teach me about madness.'

I hear myself sigh. 'Sir,' I say, 'there are so many kinds of madness and folly – of which love, perhaps, is both the sweetest and the most fearful – that I hardly know where to begin. However, one evening when I was in this Fenland place, which is a place quite outside the world that we inhabit here, I did find myself moved – by the scent of some flowers, it seemed to me! – to speak my thoughts about the Footsteps of Madness. These I could relate to you, if you wished, for it was a most strange thing to me that they were never heeded or commented upon, it appearing to me quite as if my listeners did not hear them, or could not hear them. And what I now wonder is whether no one in my life can ever hear them or understand them, except you.'

'Most probable. Relate them, then.'

And so I begin. I do not merely set out for the King my thesis upon the tangled pathways to madness and the great reluctance of the world to explore the reasons why each one is taken, but lay before him everything I have learnt about my own foolishness and everything I have done to cure myself of it. In short, I anatomise my heart. I reach inside myself and take hold of it and lay it before him. And all the while, he listens sometimes grave, sometimes smiling, as if – even though he 'knows it all and understands it all' – the story that I tell him is new and full of extraordinary things that have never before been told to him, neither in the Clock Room nor in any other place in his Kingdom.

Presently, it grows dark and Chiffinch brings lighted lamps and positions them round us.

We eat grapes, spitting the pips into a silver spitoon.

And the King comes at last to the subject of Celia, intertwined with which is the subject of his new love, Mrs Stewart, for whom, he whispers to me, 'I have a most maddening folly, Merivel, so that were I with her upon a certain parapet, and supposed to be showing her the planet Jupiter, I would turn my back upon the entire starry universe just to cup her breasts in my hands.'

We burst out laughing and this laughter turns into the kind of giggling we used to indulge in on spring afternoons on the Whitehall croquet lawns. And so the whole question of Celia is accorded no seriousness at all, as if she were a toy we had once thrown about from one to the other and had long grown tired of.

'I do declare,' says the King at last, 'that your idea of an annulment may be very useful, for then I shall be able to compensate Celia for the loss of my person at Kew by giving her a new husband: a young, handsome one this time! What do you think? Will this console her? What about Lord Greville d'Arblay's son, who is a very beautiful boy?'

I reply that I cannot – knowing Celia the little that I do -make any guess about who or what may compensate her, but the King, suddenly serious, shakes his head and says quietly: 'That is not so. For we both know that nothing in the world will make up for what she has lost.'

'Yes, we know it,' I reply, 'but it is Uncomfortable Knowledge.'

'Precisely. So where shall we consign it?'

'I do not know, Sir.'

'Yes, you do.'

'Where, then?'

'To oblivion, of course.'

And so we change the subject, and the great matter of my wife, the King's mistress, seems to pass out of my life entirely, so that my memory of Celia's face and of her singing voice fades and floats away into silence. And I feel a profound peace coming upon me, a peace such I cannot remember since I was a child and sat in the quiet of Amos Treefeller's room while my mother stroked my hair and told me it was the colour of sand.

In this state of quiet and content, I decide that I will tell the King about my child. And I discover that the story of Margaret moves him very much and he, in turn, tells me what a great love he feels for the first of his bastard children, the Duke of Monmouth, and advises me not to neglect my child 'but let her into your life, Merivel, and give generously of your self to her.'

I nod and promise that I will and then, because I am thinking about Margaret, I turn my head and look out of the open window eastwards along the river. And this is what I see. I see a great patch of orange light in the sky. I turn back to the King. 'Sir,' I say, 'look there! If I am not mistaken a great part of the city is burning.'

No sooner had I said this than we heard voices in the chamber beyond us and then there was a knocking at the door. The King rose at once, his mood of kindness leaving him on the instant, so that his countenance appeared suddenly dark.

Men began to crowd into the chamber. One I recognised as the clerk from the Navy Office, with whom I had once learned about the patience of a marble cutter. And it was he who now related to the King how an easterly wind had sprung up within the hour and was now blowing the fire 'along a great pathway half a mile in width.'

Forgetting me entirely, the King went with this man and the others into his Drawing Room and I heard him command them to fetch out the Lord Mayor and give him orders that all the wooden houses in the path of the fire be demolished, 'this being the only way we can employ to halt it and put it out.' The men went away in great haste and I heard the King shout to Chiffinch to go tell his brother, the Duke of York, what was happening and to send for a groom to saddle a fast horse.

And then he went rushing out of the great doors to the Stone Gallery without any word to me or any backward look and I was left alone in his apartments and the only sounds were the chiming and pinging of two hundred clocks, each in their own time beginning to strike the hour.