"Restoration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tremain Rose)

Chapter Eighteen. A Tarantella

I could not sleep that night. Near one o'clock, I rose and lit a lamp, being suddenly very tired of the darkness. And in the yellow lamplight I examined my hands, which is a thing I do sometimes when I am troubled, and in consequence I know the appearance of my hands extraordinarily well. My fingers are wide and red and the ends of them very flat, with flat nails. My palms are moist and hot. On the backs of my hands are a few hairs and some freckles. They are Merivel's hands, not Robert's, yet when they take up the scalpel they do not tremble and they do not err.

It was not my turn for a Night Keeping, but at two, I heard Ambrose and Edmund get up, so I pulled on my breeches and my boots and took my lamp and joined them. On our way to William Harvey (where, in truth, I hoped to find Katharine awake so that she could see me and know I had not abandoned her) Ambrose whispered to me: "The diseased mind, alas, is more prey to violent affections than that which is well."

I smiled. "I know that well, Ambrose," I said.

"Whereas," continued Ambrose, "the true saint loves all men and yet none in particular. And this is a vow that we, the Keepers, have taken at Whittlesea – to emulate the love of saints."

He said nothing more, only strode on very fast, but I knew that I had been reproached. I turned to Edmund, who still walked in step with me. "It was pity for Katharine, for her condition – which touches upon several unanswered questions in my own life – that moved me to help her, Edmund," I said.

"I neither gave to her, nor sought from her, any promises of love."

"I believe you, Robert."

"But we cannot, each on our own, help all of them…"

"Although it is precisely this that we must try to do."

"And I believed that if I could just help one…"

"What did you believe?"

"That I would know at last that I was useful."

"Useful?"

"Yes."

"And why should you assume you were not already useful?"

"Because… it was once told to me."

"By whom?"

"By whom does not matter. That I believed him is what has counted with me."

"But it should not trouble you now, Robert. You are 'useful' to Whittlesea. All I would counsel is that, from now on, you stay away from Katharine."

"And yet…"

"Ambrose would say there can be no 'and yets'."

"I was so near to a cure for her!"

"Perhaps that is somewhat arrogant. Cures are not performed by us, Robert. Only Jesus cures. And we are his agents."

We were at William Harvey by this time and Ambrose had already gone in. Familiarity with this most wretched place has not lessened my loathing of it. Piebald knows how much I fear it and likes to play upon my fears. "Does it swallow you?" he asks. "Is it like the grave to your little soul?"

Mercifully, he was asleep that night with his snout in the straw, but as I passed him I noted, as if for the first time, how sinewy and fleshless are his neck and his limbs and I thought of his vanished provisions and then of the probability that if, one day, I unlocked Piebald from his chains and asked him to kill me with his hands, he would no longer have the strength.

Despite Edmund's advice, I went at once to the stall where Katharine was lying. I bent over her. She had woken from her laudanum sleep, but the opiate was still in her blood and she lay without moving. When she saw me, she attempted to sit up and in trying to move her leg found herself held down by the iron cuff on her ankle. She opened her mouth to cry out, but no sound came from her. I was about to reach out and put a hand on her forehead to calm her when Ambrose came into the stall. He knelt down and lifted Katharine a little and held a cup of water to her lips and she drank, but she did not look at Ambrose nor at the cup, but only at me and as she lapped the water her eyes filled with oily tears. "Speak to her," Ambrose said quietly. "Tell her you are not leaving Whittlesea, for your life is here now."

I endeavoured to do this. "My horse has ridden away," I said, "so there will be no more going out of the gate. And I shall be – "

I could not finish the sentence. Ambrose finished it for me: "With us all," he said. "Robert is with us all."

And I nodded. And Ambrose took away the water cup and lay Katharine down. And into my mind came the image of the husband, the stone mason laying his wife down on the bowed backs of the vaults and unbuttoning himself and asking of her acts of submission in the very roof of God's house.

Two days later, Katharine was returned to Margaret Fell. Ambrose instructed me in what he called "new ways" of caring for her. I could visit her only once each day and not at all during the night, except when it was my turn for a Night Keeping. The duration of my visits to her should not exceed half an hour. I was permitted to continue rubbing her feet with soap, "but only with the soap, Robert, and not with your naked palm", and told to show her no more attention that I would show to any in George Fox. "In this way," said Ambrose, "her affection for you will be held in check, but beware above all, Robert, that you do not let it flatter you and so seek it out."

I replied, as truthfully as I could, that I sought nothing from Katharine at all, only to find a cure for her sleeplessness.

"A cure!" said Ambrose. "I know of no other word that so beguiles us. Yet you, as a physician, know that certain states and conditions are not susceptible to cure – unless there be some intervention from God."

"I accept that," I said. "But with regard to sleep, I have recently begun to comprehend some of its mysteries…"

"I know you believe you do, Robert. Yet it may be that you are not yet as learned on the subject as you think yourself. Time will tell you, no doubt."

I sighed, being crestfallen by Ambrose's severity.

"Time!" I said moodily. "I was once told I was a man of my time, but at some moment – and I could not precisely say when – I think that my time and I parted company, and now I do not belong to it at all, indeed I do not really belong anywhere…"

"Beware your very vast self-pity, Robert," said Ambrose, "and bend your thoughts and your energies instead towards music."

"Towards music?"

"Yes. John and I and the others have now pondered long enough upon some words you spoke at a Meeting in spring. And we concede that to organise a little dancing – on midsummer's day perhaps? – might have some beneficial effect upon us all. So what do you say? Will you play for us?"

I looked up at Ambrose. His large face had a large grin upon it. I cleared my throat.

"I am not… as marvellous a player as I would like to be, Ambrose," I said. "Before I came here, I was getting some oboe lessons from a German teacher, but they were curtailed."

"Well, we are speaking of simple tunes, are we not: a polka, a tarantella?"

"Yes…"

"Will you do it?"

"If there was any among us who played a string… then the sound would be somewhat better and more rounded."

"Talk to Daniel. He has learned the fiddle and the two of you can rehearse your pieces in the parlour."

Ambrose left me then and I sat down in the kitchen, where this conversation had taken place, and began to imagine the women of Margaret Fell and the men of George Fox coming out into the sunshine and hearing music and looking about them stupidly, some of them being uncertain whether the sounds were there in the air or only there in their minds. The thought made me smile.

I took a radish from a bowl on the table and ate it and the harsh taste of it reminded me of my curing of Lou-Lou and, in the midst of my contentment about the forthcoming dancing at Whittlesea, I had a moment's longing for the sight of the old noisy river.

That evening, after spending my allotted half hour with Katharine (who, when I am with her is, in five minutes, soothed and calmed by my touching of her feet, so that she falls asleep with a strange smile on her face) I went to my room and unwrapped my oboe from the words of Plato, inserted a new reed into the mouthpiece and began to play a scale or two with the correct fingering taught to me by Herr Hummel. To hold the instrument in my hands again gave me a feeling of peculiar happiness. I did not in the least mind the monotony of the scales, but rather delighted in them, endeavouring to play them faster and faster and finding my clumsy fingers almost adequate to the task.

I then paused, dried the reed, and embarked upon Swans Do All A-Swimming Go which, notwithstanding that my instrument was a little out of tune and my tuning skills very paltry, I declare I played more sweetly than I had ever done in the summer-house at Bidnold. As I finished the piece, there was a knock on my door. I opened it and found Eleanor there. "Robert," she said, "may I come in and listen to you? May I listen for a short while?"

"Well," I said, "you are welcome, but the while will be exceedingly short, for that little song is the only piece I know!"

As I have told you, Eleanor is a person of great good nature and, although I knew her to be disappointed at the severe limitations to my repertoire, she did not show her disappointment, but only said brightly, "Why then, play that one again." So she sat down on my bed (a cot it is rather, not a true real bed) which is the only place where one is able to sit in my linen cupboard, and I played the Swans for her a second time and when I had finished, she wiped her eyes with her apron and pronounced the music "most sweet."

Now, this week, with midsummer approaching and the stifling weather still with us and all of Whittlesea plagued by flies, I pass much of each day with Daniel who, just as I had imagined, is quite adept as a fiddle player and whose goal it now is to teach me to play on my oboe simple accompaniments to three or four sprightly tunes for which he possesses sheets of music so seemingly ancient and yellow and bedraggled it is as if they had once been dredged from the sea by Sir Walter Raleigh. One is called Une Tarentelle de Lyon and was composed by a person who signs himself Ch. de B. Fauconnier, and this piece is so fast that firstly, I cannot keep up with it on my instrument and, secondly, I wonder if Ch. de B. Fauconnier did not go mad in the writing of it and end his days in a Lyonnais asile. As I muse on this possibility, Daniel chides me gently for "having the habit of talking too much."

The anniversary of my wedding, the seventh of June, has come and gone. It is most strange to reflect that, when I put on my purple garb and my three-masted barque, I imagined that here was a new beginning that would bind my life ever more firmly to the life of the King; and to understand now that my wedding day began for me nothing at all but a year of great loneliness and striving and ridicule.

Though determined not to dwell upon any memory of my wedding, I did find myself waking very early on the morning of the seventh of June and recalling how I had gone out from the feast and flung myself on the lawn of Sir Joshua's house and cried, there to be found by Pearce, to whose life I do indeed seem to be bound and without whom I would truly feel myself to be very alone. And it came into my mind to thank Pearce, there and then, for his friendship, to tell him how, in my least action, I try to measure in my mind how he would see the thing and judge it. And how in this way -though I sometimes rail against it – he is present in all that I do, so that for as long as I live (whether here with him or elsewhere) he will always be with me, like Jesus Christ is with the true believers. But I did not stir, only lay on my little bed and watched the sunrise, and thought of my friend asleep, holding his ladle.

In my struggles with Une Tarentelle de Lyon and the other dances, I soon pushed from my mind my wedding day thoughts. Daniel, being a far less condescending teacher than Musikmeister Hummel, has succeeded in teaching me a great deal in a short while and I feel, in the making of this music, some of that uncontrollable excitement that afflicted me when I did my wild, splodged painting of my park. Hours pass and we play on, struggling always for a faster tempo, and these rehearsals of ours have brought great jollity to the house, the Friends clustering round us and clapping their hands and Edmund unable to restrain himself from skipping about.

"Music!" thunders Ambrose after grace one suppertime. "Why was music not always with us at Whittlesea?" And I look round the table at the faces which all nod in agreement and I marvel suddenly, that these Quakers, who love plainness in all things and loathe and detest the sung services of the High Church, should be so taken with the mad gallop of Ch. de B. Fauconnier that when at last we strike up our tarantella for the inmates of our Bedlam I am certain that Ambrose and Pearce and Edmund and Eleanor and Hannah will be the leaders of the mad revels.

Very seldom do letters arrive at Whittlesea, it being a deliberately forgotten place. The mail coach goes to Earls Bride and no further, so that any letters for Whittlesea are brought out to us by the village children and a penny given to them for each one delivered.

Since my coming here, I have written only one letter – to Will Gates whom I presume still to be at Bidnold. In some very inadequate sentences, I thanked him for all his pains on my behalf and apologised to him for the change in my fortunes. I asked him to keep for himself the painted cage of the Indian Nightingale and to be assured always of my affection for him.

I had received no reply, nor expected any. Writing words on paper is not one of Will's gifts. However, one day before the dance, as the Airing Court was being swept, an urchin arrived at the gate bearing a letter for me. It was from Will. It read thus:

Good Sir Robert,

Your servant W. Gates is most thankful of your kindnesses, one and many, to him. He is well sorry for your departing. You are in his memory in the cage, kindly given. And will be therefor always.

The tiding is your house has passed and land and all to a French noble, Le Viscomte de Confolens, and a most forwardy, ticklish man preferring to regard his own wig and nose and Beauty Spots in the glass than to note any good thing at Bidnold.

Merciful thanks Le V. is not much visiting here. But when he comes, comes with a retenue of ladies, all French. Some very common seeming and shrieking out in their language and showing their feet.

I am and M. Cattlebury to be kept hired here and so too the grooms and maids, according to Sir J. Babbacombe.

But we are not paid our money. We have no wage from Le Viscomte, Sir Robert, and I have writ to Sir J. Babbacombe to tell him this.

My Lady Bathurst did arrive here in May and says to me 0 Mister Gates what is to become of this place! And truly I did not know what to answer. And she then weeping. And as I am a Norfolk man and so backward in grace could not stop myself weeping also. But I am sorry for it. So keep you well, Sir and Mister Pearce also. And if you can write me any letter, I will be happy.

Your still remaining Servant,

Wm. Gates

I folded this letter after I had read it once and stowed it away in the sea chest, thus hoping to put it out of my mind, for I do not deny it made me feel sad. Pearce, as it chanced, came seeking me on some errand just as I was putting the thing away and saw at once (for nothing that I feel can I seem to conceal from him) that some portion of my past was once again preoccupying my mind, which should have dwelled only and entirely on my great Cure by Dancing that was to be tried the next day. He stood at the door and regarded me and without asking me what my letter had contained, he said, in his sternest voice: "I presume you are familiar with the Act of Praemunire, Robert?"

"No," I replied, "I am not, John."

"Let me enlighten you then. The Act of Praemunire permits the confiscation – immediate and without redress, upon the presentation of a warrant of Praemunire – of property, goods and chattels as a punishment for Non-Conformity. Hundreds of Quakers have lost their houses and their land under the terms of this loathsome edict. The suffering caused by it has been beyond what you could imagine. So do not believe you are singled out, Robert. You are merely one of many. The King has behaved towards you as towards a Quaker, and this is all."

Before I could make any answer to this, Pearce had turned and walked away leaving behind him in my room a faint smell of the mithridate with which he continues to dose himself, his cold and catarrh yielding to no cure at all, not even to the hot, dry weather.

When I woke the following morning, I was aware of a strange sound in the room, a sound with which I knew myself to be familiar, yet could not for a moment interpret.

I lay and listened. I knew it to be very early, for the light at the window was grey. And then it came upon me what I was hearing. I sprang out of my cot and drew back the hessian drapes at the window and I saw that I was not mistaken: a great sheeting rain was coming down upon us and upon all the preparations we had made for the dancing. The Airing Court, baked to a hard, yellow dryness by the sun, was to have been our dancing floor. Now it was already returning to slimy mud.

The Keepers (who are not usually cast down by any occurrence) seemed sad – every one of them including Pearce – at the cancellation of the dance. Into this sadness I cast a question that had been troubling me for some time: "When we at last begin the music and the occupants of George Fox and Margaret Fell come out, what is to happen to those in William Harvey?"

"They cannot dance, Robert," said Pearce.

"We cannot unchain them," said Edmund.

"But they will hear the music," said Ambrose. "We will open the doors of William Harvey so that the sounds reach them."

I was forced to be content with these answers, but was vexed to find a terrible pity for the men and women of WH coming over me, such as I had never felt before, not even upon my first sight of them in their rags and straw. And I remembered my journey to Kew with the tilt-man, how I had passed Whitehall and seen light at the windows and heard laughter and yet myself been outside on the flat, dark water; and I knew that what I detest about the world is that one man's happiness is so often another man's pain.

It rained for two days and in that small bit of time Daniel and I, to divert ourselves, invented some sweet harmonies and variations to my old tune, Swans Do All, so that it was transformed from a dull little song into music of great prettiness. And after supper of the second day, we got our instruments and played it in the parlour for the Keepers, and the thing which pleased me about our playing was that I could tell that Pearce was very moved by it, though he would say no more to me about it than, "Progress, Robert. You are making progress."

So it was on the last day of June, just past the summer solstice, that we opened the doors of Fox and Fell and led out the people. On a trestle table were three pails of water and some cups and ladles, and I watched how some of the men, before any dancing had begun, started to ladle water over their heads and laugh. And then others joined them and this playing with the water seemed to preoccupy them utterly, as if it was the thing on earth they most loved to do. But then Daniel and I began on a polka and slowly all the group clustered near to the wooden podium on which we stood and stared at us, their mouths gaping and some putting their hands over their ears. It was most difficult to play with this press of people on us. And then I saw Katharine push her way from the back of the group to the front, and she stood so close to me that I had to turn aside a little for fear of poking my oboe into her eye.

We finished the polka and I wiped my brow and some of the people applauded with their fingers splayed out like children and some laughed and some went back to the water buckets.

Ambrose then came and stood with us on the podium. Addressing the multitude of mad people, he said: "Today, instead of walking round the tree, we are going to dance. Robert and Daniel will play and we are going to skip or gallop. What steps we do, what patterns we make, do not matter. We can dance in a square or in a circle or each on his own like a dancing dot. Your Keepers, all of us, will dance with you. And now we are going to begin."

Ambrose stepped down and he and Hannah and Eleanor and the others each took one man or woman to be their partner and so we struck up another polka and the press of people turned away from us a little to watch those now skipping about, among whom was Pearce who had not the least idea how to dance a polka but was jumping up and down, holding the hands of an elderly woman, as thin as he, who began to cackle with a laughter so violent that she could scarcely breathe.

After the third or fourth time, perceiving that only a few joined in any kind of dance and many only stared about them in confusion and outrage, I saw that my experiment risked turning into a lamentable failure. Katharine had now sat down on the ground and was holding onto my boot, thus causing me to feel as if I was chained to the floor like those in WH, from which building we could now hear shouts and cries and a loud banging on the wall.

I felt very sick with embarrassment. "It is not working," I whispered to Daniel. "They do not understand what to do."

Daniel put down his fiddle and took off his waistcoat. His face was red and sweating. Then he picked up the violin again, twanged the A-string to tune it and said to me, "Try the tarantella."

I sighed. I thought of all the hours we had spent rehearsing the difficult Tarentelle de Lyon. They seemed utterly in vain. I blew some spittle from my reed, then I bent down and took Katharine's hand from my foot and lifted her up. And I spoke out to the so-called dancers:

"We shall play a tarantella for you," I announced. "This is a whirling dance. So why do you not whirl and turn and jump, or do anything you will? Pretend you are leaves flying, or children skipping."

There was some laughter at this. I smiled, trying to pretend I was very pleased and happy, then prepared myself to play. As I lifted up my instrument, Katharine reached out and caught hold of my arm and said to me, "Dance with me."

"I cannot…" I said.

"Robert cannot," said Daniel. "Robert is the music!"

"Dance with me," said Katharine again, and she began to pull at me, so that I was nearly toppled from the podium.

But Edmund was at Katharine's side now, having seen what was happening to me.

"Come," he said to her. "I shall show you a proper tarantella." And she let herself be led away.

"Save us from this, Daniel!" I whispered.

And he smiled that smile of his which is like the smile of a child.

So we began on the dance. The heat of the afternoon and fear of the failure of the venture made us play it as fast and urgently as we had ever done and, as we entered upon the second rondo of it, I began to have cause to give thanks to Ch. de B. Fauconnier, whoever he may have been, for he had indeed written a strange and stirring piece of music. As we neared the end of it, I whispered to Daniel that we should recommence and keep on because I saw that it held the attention of almost everyone assembled and that in their uncoordinated ways they were struggling to move about.

We played the tarantella five times without stopping and the sweat poured down my forehead and stung my eyes so that the scene in front of me became shimmery and lit with a strange bright winking light like the étincellement of a star. But I knew by the end of the fifth tarantella that everyone was moving, trying to spin and whirl and clapping their hands and some trying to sing and some wailing and some shrieking like the devil.

I have never seen nor heard nor been any part of any thing that was like this hour. And when it was over and we stopped playing and wiped our faces, I felt for the briefest moment of time that I was no longer merely myself, no longer Merivel, nor even Robert, but joined absolutely in spirit to every man and woman there, and I wanted to make a circle with my arms and take them in.

That night in William Harvey, Pearce and I, at the hour of the Night Keeping, found a dead woman.

The clamour and agitation in WH was terrible to witness and I knew that the music had caused it.

As we covered the dead body, on whom, Pearce informed me, we would perform an autopsy the following day, I said to him, "For two or three we have helped in George Fox and Margaret Fell we have sacrificed one here." He nodded. "None of us," he said, "gave this sufficient thought."

We administered a dose of belladonna to every inmate of WH who allowed himself to swallow it (Piebald spat his into my face) and left them to a misery that none of them had words to express.

It was a great relief to come out of WH and to go into Margaret Fell where, notwithstanding a very strong stench of sweat, there was a feeling of calm in the place and we saw at once that all the women were sleeping. Katharine, alone, was awake. She was sitting up and holding the doll to her breast – which was naked and out of her torn robe – as it might be to suckle an infant.

"Stay with her a few minutes," said Pearce, "and I will go on to George Fox. It's getting towards morning and your tarantella has made me tired, Robert."

It was my vow, these days, never to be left alone with Katharine. Ambrose and Edmund had helped me to see what harm I had – all unintentionally – done to her by causing her to feel for me an affection (a love even?) that I could not return. Since understanding this, I had stayed more aloof from her, sometimes getting Hannah or Eleanor to take over the task of rubbing her feet and once telling her that I was too busy to stay and listen to the stories of her past.

On this night of the tarantella, however, I did sit down beside her and took her feet in my lap and began rubbing them, being once again very moved by her condition of sleeplessness.

She sat quite still and watched me. After a few moments, she set her doll aside, then slowly, with a self-caressing hand pulled aside her nightgown and exposed her other breast to me. She licked her lips and regarded me, and in her exhausted eyes I could discern a slow, sleepy, all-enveloping lust. I let go of her feet and made as if to get up, but she reached out and held me, and moved the heel of her right foot up into my groin where, to my great shame and fear, I knew she would find me hard.

I prayed.

I prayed for Pearce to return.

I prayed to God to give Robert the strength to walk away and not let Merivel do as he wished, which was to lay the madwoman down beneath him.

And after a moment or two, in which I did not move, I heard a voice calling me softly from the door. "Here I am, John," I said. And I got up and followed my friend out into the cool air of four o'clock.