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

Chapter Five. Two Worms

During my fanciful and hectic redecorations at Bidnold, I had allowed myself to ignore the possibility that Celia Clemence would one day take up habitation under its roof.

Thus, although the house contained eleven bedchambers, none, in my mind, had been furnished for the woman Violet Bathurst jealously referred to as "Lady Merivel, Your Bride", but whose continuing existence was invariably absent from my mind. "Listen, Violet," I was in the habit of saying on the occasion of my Lady B's envious outbursts. "I am no more conscious of Celia as my lawful wife than Bathurst is of you as his. Rest assured that I never think of her."

Usually, Violet's jealousy would be assuaged by this statement, but one evening, even as I knelt over her and gently eased my tumescent member along the soft furrow between her breasts, she suddenly reached up and pushed me sideways, so that I would have fallen onto the floor had my right leg not been tangled in the sheet. "Your analogy with Bathurst," she said crossly, "is misleading and, if deliberately so, then you are a cruel and cynical man. For as you well know, Merivel, Bathurst has moments of remembering and at such times becomes importunate. On Wednesday night, for instance, lucidity returned to him in the middle of supper and he began crawling towards me on his hands and knees under the Dining-Room table, the while unbuttoning himself. If I had not quickly reminded him that his brace of woodcock – his favourite game – were getting cold on his plate, I simply do not know what might have happened. And so it may be with you, Merivel. That which you swear you have forgotten, you will one day come grovelling towards."

"Violet," I said, recovering my kneeling position (only disconcerted very mildly by the similarity of my stance to Bathurst 's under the table), "grovelling is a thing I have done but once in my life, when I inadvertently fell over at the King's feet. The notion that I will ever, as long as I am of sound mind, grovel to Celia is a pure fiction, not to be entertained for one second more!"

I put my mouth upon Violet's at this moment, thus preventing further speech, and the evening proceeded very pleasantly, Violet's sudden attack of jealousy having roused her to a wild and shameless abandon.

But even as I saw her into her coach, I found myself remembering Celia and wondering where, in the unlikely event of her unexpected arrival at Bidnold, I would lodge her. Had I not, on my strange wedding night, witnessed the immodest thrusting of her loins towards the King's mouth and heard through the closet door a wailing of pleasure worthy of an African wildcat, I would have believed Celia to be an entirely chaste and modest person, a person of sober taste and small appetite, finding comfort and contentment in a bedchamber hung, say, with pale apricot moire and ornamented by sombre prints of rivers and cathedrals. As it was, by the time I had ceased waving to Violet's gloved hand disappearing into the night, I had already decided that what I called the Marigold Room would be the one I would offer to Celia. Late as the hour was, I had my servants go up and light candles in the Marigold Room, so that I could take a look at it. I would have given the thing no thought at all but for Violet. For this one brief night, she had awoken in me a minute flicker of excitement at the idea of my wife's arrival. The next morning, however, Celia was once more consigned to that part of my brain I imagine to be like a coiled fistula, filled not with putrescent matter, but with utter darkness and into which so much of what I have once known is carefully crammed.

Now, here I am, in my torn stockings and with my bleeding hand, staring at my poor wife as she turns to me on the stairway and I read in her face some terrible calamity. "My dear!" I burst out, whipping from my pocket a plum-coloured silk handkerchief and fumblingly binding my hand with it. "Welcome to Bidnold! If you had given me a little warning, I would have made everything ready for you."

"I need no welcome," says Celia, and her voice is reedy, like the voice of an old dying crone. "The servants will show me to my room."

"Yes," I stammer, "or I will show you. It's to be the Marigold Room…"

My hand is bound now, but as I take hold of the banister rail and prepare to mount the stairs towards her, I see her recoil from me, as from some rearing viper. "Stay away!" she whispers, seemingly faint with revulsion. "Please stay away."

I stop at once and smile at her kindly. "Celia," I say, remembering her name at last, "you need have no fear of me whatsoever. I will never ask anything of you. All I wanted was to show you to your room, the colours and furnishings of which I hope may be of some comfort to you in whatever misfortune – "

"The servants will show me. Where is my woman, Sophia?"

"What?" I say.

"Where is my woman? Where is Sophia?"

"I have no idea. Did you bring her with you? She's your maid?"

"Yes. Call her please, Merivel."

I turn and look towards the front door. Two grooms are stumbling through it with a leather trunk, filled no doubt with ermine-trimmed bonnets and newt-skin shoes bought for his Dear One by my sometime master, the King. My mind is travelling in sudden sorrow towards a certain set of striped dinner napkins, now unused but kept folded in linen in an oaken chest, when I suddenly see Pearce, panting and wheezing like his late mule, arrive in my hall.

"Ah, Pearce." I say quickly. "Have you caught sight of a woman named Sophia?"

Pearce is blinking. His huge eyes, his prehensile nose and his long neck make him, on the instant, resemble a species of nocturnal tree-climbing animals I have seen described as marsupials (a strange word).

"No," says Pearce. "What is occurring, Merivel? I scent some misfortune."

"Yes," I say, "misfortune there does seem to be. But for now we must find my wife's woman…"

"Your wife is come?"

"Yes. Here she is. Go out to her carriage please, Pearce, and tell her maid that her mistress calls."

Pearce is wiping his eyes on his threadbare cloak, the better to believe that the ghostly woman in black is indeed Celia Clemence, last glimpsed by him laughing merrily at her wedding. I am about to urge him outside once more when a buxom, ugly, dark-haired woman of perhaps thirty-five appears, carrying two or three dresses in her arms.

"Sophia," Celia calls hoarsely, "come up."

Sophia looks from Pearce to me, seems immediately affronted by the sight of us both and so goes swiftly up the stairs to where her mistress is reaching out her hand.

At my side, emerged from I know not where, I now find Will Gates.

"Will," I say with great urgency, "please conduct my wife and her woman to the Marigold Room."

"The Marigold Room, Sir?" whispers Will. "Might I suggest another?"

"No, you might not," I snap.

Will glares at me but nonetheless, like the matchless servant that he is, goes nimbly up the stairs past the two women and with his habitual unflowery courtesy leads them onwards and up. The grooms follow with the heavy trunks and boxes.

I did not see Celia again that day.

After supper, which I took alone with Pearce, I enquired of my cook whether orders had come down for food. I was told that some bouillon and a plum tartlet had been sent up.

"Was it eaten?" I asked.

"Either that," said my wall-eyed chef, Cattlebury, "or the dog had it?"

"Dog?"

"Aye, Sir."

"What dog, Cattlebury?"

"Mr Gates, Sir, says they brought in a dog, a small Spaniel like the one as died on you, Sir Robert."

Ah, was my melancholy thought as I left the kitchens, the King is too cunning for us all! To those he knows he must one day abandon, he gives this sweet, living gift, just to be certain that our love for him remains with us (as if he could doubt that it would!) in case he may, at some future time, have need of us again. Poor Celia!

As I returned to my Study, where I had left Pearce reading some forgotten Latin text from my Padua days, I resolved that I must try, as soon as she would let me, to offer words of understanding and comfort, and in so doing perhaps find a little relief from my own despair. For there was no doubt in my mind now: the King had sent her away. She had played her part, just as I had once played mine, and now he had cast us off. I imagine him at dinner, his arm draped elegantly round Lady Castlemaine's white shoulders, the candlelight lending a seductive gloss to the little moustache he keeps so fastidiously trimmed. He leans towards Castlemaine, nibbles the emerald dangling from her ear. "What do you know of Norfolk, Barbara?" he whispers.

"Very little," she replies, "except that it is far from London!"

"Precisely!" smiles the King, "and therefore useful to me. It is there, you see, that I envoie all those I have begun to find tedious."

"Well," I said to Pearce, as I sat down in the Study, "I believe I know now for certain what has happened. What I greatly fear, however, is that Celia will believe her life is over. I really do not think she will ever be consoled."

Pearce (as is one of his irritating habits, detested by me since our student days) did not so much as glance up from his book when I finished speaking, but simply read on, as if I had not even entered the room. I waited. Sometimes I find Pearce so deeply annoying that, were I the King, I could have bouts of wanting to send him to Norfolk.

"Pearce," I said, "did you hear what I said?"

"No," said Pearce. "I didn't. I imagine it was some observation on your wife's plight."

"Yes, it was."

"Well, I have nothing to add. Fools such as you have become and courtesans such as she, once the whiplash of mirth or passion has died, invariably feel the scourge of the whip itself."

I sighed. I opened my mouth to discourage Pearce from further muddled metaphorical utterances of this kind when he lifted the little book he'd been reading and brandished it in my face.

"This is interesting!" he announced. "On the Cartesian question of spontaneous generation: 'For if generation of the lower forms is not spontaneous, then vermiculus unde venit? Whence the maggot?' "

I got up. "I'm sorry, Pearce," I said, my voice brittle and cold, "but I do not feel able, after the troubles of this day, to enter upon a discussion of maggots. I shall go and play my oboe until bedtime."

With that I strode out and went to my Music Room. I shall spare you an account of my struggles with my instrument that evening and the quantity of anxious spittle with which reed after reed was saturated. I shall report only that I wrestled with simple scales for an hour or more, after which time my grazed hand was giving me so much pain that I lay down on the floor of the Music Room and put it between my thighs, with my knees drawn up to my stomach, and in this childlike posture fell into a troubled sleep.

When I awoke, very stiff and cold, with my hand swollen and set into a premature rigor mortis, I saw from the grey light at the window that the winter dawn was breaking over Norfolk, County of Exiles. Despite my numbness and pain, I found myself, on the instant of waking, filled with purpose and resolve. I must go immediately to Celia. I must make her understand that, stranger to her though I am, disagreeable though she may find my physical self, I am occasionally a person of generous mind and that – forswearing any hope of recompense or reward – I am content to be her protector and treat her with respect and kindness for as long as she remains at Bidnold.

I went up to my own chamber, where I changed my clothes and wig. None of the servants was yet stirring. By the handsome timepiece given to me by the King, I saw that it was a little before six. The embers of a fire were still glowing in my grate and I tried to warm my dead hand somewhat before setting out along the chilly corridors to the Marigold Room.

I stopped in front of Celia's door. I could hear a tiny, piteous sound, which I first took to be weeping, but then recognised all too foolishly well as the whimpering of a Spaniel. Minette, Minette, I thought. I grieve for you. You are buried in the park and the deer chomp the grass above you… But this was quite the wrong moment for self-pity, so I knocked with a firm and authorative hand (my left hand, the other one being now afflicted with a sudden intolerable pricking and tingling) and waited.

After a moment or two, an unfamiliar foreign-sounding voice, the voice of Sophia no doubt, called angrily: "Who is there?"

"Sir Robert," I replied, "I want to speak to Lady Merivel, please."

The dog was now scrabbling at the door. I believe the maid pushed it away roughly before she said: "My mistress is sleeping. Go, please, away."

"No," I said. "I will not go away. Please wake my wife. I have much that is important to say to her."

"No!" hissed Sophia. "My Lady is sleeping!"

"She may sleep later. I must speak to her now."

I was about to add that at this precise moment I was feeling a great deal of compassion for Celia but that such is the nature of mood and emotion that I could not guarantee, if forced to return at another time, to find within me the same degree of kindness, when the door was opened. The maid stood there in her nightgown and lace cap. I saw now that her skin was sallow and her upper lip uncommonly hairy. I decided she must be one of the large retinue of Portuguese women who had been shipped to England with Catherine of Braganza, many of whom had found themselves forced to serve outside their beloved Queen's household and who, by the Whitehall gallants, were known scathingly as "the Farthingales" after the peculiar hooped skirts beneath which they concealed their stocky legs.

This Sophia gave me a look of the utmost loathing as I went past her into the room. I shall be rid of you, Farthingale, I said to her in my mind, for I am master here.

I must relate, however, that in the scene which followed (I deliberately refer to it as a "scene", for the albeit unoriginal notion that my life since my wedding has become something of a farce does very often strike me as apt) I demonstrated all too lamentably my lack of masterliness and found myself most horribly insulted and abused. This is what happened:

I found Celia, not in bed as Farthingale had pretended, but sitting on the orange and green cushions of the window seat, fully dressed in her black garb, staring out at the dismal dawn.

I asked her if she had slept well and she replied that she had not slept at all so hideous did she find the room, so vulgar, so gaudy and tasteless. She could not, she said, imagine anyone – except probably myself – being capable of finding any rest within it.

Reminding myself that I should not become angry, I assured her calmly that she was free to select another room whenever she wished. I then asked her if I might sit down. She answered that she would prefer me to remain standing.

By this time disconcerted by Celia's hostility, of which I truly believed myself undeserving, I nevertheless began upon what I had come to say. I told Celia that I of all people, who had briefly known some affection from the King, understood exceedingly well the quality, the measure of her sadness. I began to speak of the terrible degree to which my being and my spirit, once calm and content in its serving of God and the Trinity, was now possessed by the King. I went so far as to say that I believed there was no man or woman in the Kingdom (be they as pious as my dead parents, be they Puritan or Quaker, be they lord or lunatic) utterly free from and untouched by any longing to see their own putrid lives lit up by his radiance. "Inevitably then," I went on, "you and I, Celia, who have known something of the man's love…"

"Love?" shrieked Celia. "What presumption, Merivel! What self-deception! How can you dare to speak of what the King felt for you as love! Not for one second, not for one mote of time did King Charles love you, Merivel. I advise you never again to use the word!"

"My only intention…" I began, but Celia, now standing and fixing upon my face her fearful eyes, refused to let me speak. She jabbed a small white finger towards my scarlet waistcoat as she yelled: "The truth is that the King, in his love for me, in his passion for me, made use of you. He used you, Merivel. He looked around for the stupidest man he could find, the densest, the most foolish, the one who would accept whatever he did like a dog and cause him no trouble – and he found you! I begged him, don't marry me to that idiot, I begged him on my knees, but all he did was laugh. "Who can I ask," he said, "to be paid cuckold except an idiot?" Do you understand, Merivel? Dense as you are, do you comprehend what I'm saying?"

Well, I'm afraid I cannot go on with the scene. It is very painful, is it not? Of course I "comprehended", as she put it. I comprehended all too chillingly and although, in her rage and despair, she flung yet more insults at me, while the odious fat Farthingale looked on and smirked, I simply am not able to set them down.

I made no further attempt to offer my friendship to Celia, let alone enquire how the King's rejection of her had come about, but quietly withdrew from the room, shutting the door behind me before Farthingale could slam it in my face.

My first thought was: to whom, after this terrible revelation, shall I turn for comfort? To Pearce? To Will Gates? To Violet Bathurst? To Meg Storey? To my lost wench, Rosie Pierpoint? I felt a most terrible need of some kindly human company. But the hour was still early, my house dark, and I imagined them all sleeping: Pearce on his back with his white hands folded upon his ladle; Will Gates on his truckle bed dreaming of village girls; Violet enclosed by sumptuous brocade, safely absent from old Bathurst's brain; Meg in her attic, fallen asleep in her drawers and with beer upon her breath; sweet Rosie in Pierpoint's bed, stirring now to the murmur of the waking river… and I let them be.

I walked away from the Marigold Room to the west wing of the house and climbed the cold stone stairway to the circular room in the turret, whose discovery had given me so much joy. The room was still empty, still untouched. I went to each of the windows and looked out. A small slit of red in the sky hinted at sunrise. A white mist lay on the park, shrouding the deer.

I sat down under one of the windows. It will never be used now, this seemingly perfect room, I thought. At least, not by me. For it is surely the place which, though it aspires to do so, my mind can neither order nor understand. It is beyond my limit. I am earthbound, gross, ignorant. I will never reach to here.

It was of course Pearce to whom I eventually confided what had been said by Celia in the Marigold Room.

I had agreed to go with him upon a strange errand: to dig up a small quantity of earth from the village graveyard, from which Pearce intended to extract the saltpetre. He is suffering, among other afflictions, from a bladder stone and hopes to dissolve it in time by swallowing regular doses of this foul substance.

For the purposes of gathering the earth, he had taken with us a small spade and a leather bag. With some chivalry (Pearce still being weak from his arduous journey across the Fens) I offered to carry the spade and Pearce hung the bag about his long neck, thus giving himself more than ever the air of a mendicant.

We walked slowly down the drive and out onto the little road that leads to the village. Once we had gathered the earth, it was my intention to offer Pearce some refreshment at the Jovial Rushcutters, over which I could tell him what had been said to me. I found, however, that so slow was the pace of Pearce's walk that I was forced to prattle to keep myself from getting cold and thus had come out with my sad story long before we had reached the village, finishing it by hurling the spade away from me in a violent gesture of anguish.

Pearce looked at me. In his large eyes, I did detect a small glimmer of pity, but for some time, during which I retrieved the spade, he walked on in silence. I was just beginning to wonder whether I should embark on my tale again, this time making certain every few sentences that he was listening to me, when Pearce cleared his throat and said:

"It is my belief, all unfashionable as I know it to be, that all things, including lunacy, may be susceptible to cure."

"What?" I said.

"It has been believed since the beginning of time, that the mad are possessed of Devils and are thus filled with evil. This evil, it is universally agreed, must be beaten out of them by extreme chastisement, torture and all other conceivable kinds of cruelty…"

"Pearce," I said, "happy as I am to discuss your work at the New Bedlam at some later time I would ask you now to give your attention to my state of mind and – "

"I am giving my attention to your state of mind, Merivel. If you could, for once, listen to what I have to say instead of disregarding me, you will see that I have some helpful ideas on the subject."

We walked on. A pale sun now emerged from behind a bank of cloud and glimmered eerily upon us.

"Let me describe to you," Pearce went on, "a woman who was brought to me at the Whittlesea Hospital – for such is the name we have given to our Bedlam. This woman had been found half drowned in a ditch after wandering the shire for month upon month, year upon year, begging and shouting obscene words, mortifying her body, particularly her breasts and her arms with sharp hawthorn twigs. Her chief delight, in her poor suffering mind, was to defile. She kept her own excrement in a pouch, with which to smear the hands and fine clothes of those who gave her alms; with the same substance she daubed tombstones and churches. When we took her in, so terrible was her rage that, though I do not like to see this done, we were forced to chain her limbs to the wall. And for several weeks, she fought night and day with her chains, so that her wrists and ankles became running sores, no matter how carefully we bound them with cloth. Do you begin to form a picture of this woman, Merivel?"

"Yes, thank you, Pearce," I said.

"Very well. Let me recount to you then the morning upon which I went to this woman and found her quiet at last. She was sitting hunched in the corner, her limbs folded up and still. As I entered, she lifted her arm and pointed to two large turds she had recently voided onto the floor. I did not particularly wish to look at them, but her pointing was very insistent and the change in her demeanour so considerable that I did what she asked. And when I approached, I saw that writhing in and out of the greenish stools were two great worms, each several inches long, very white and loathsome. And then I looked again at the woman and she was weeping. And I unchained her and we took her away and washed her and put her in a clean bed. And from that day she was calm and talked with us of her home when she was a child and of the baby she had in her sister's care and we knew that she was cured. The worms had poisoned her blood and this poisoned blood had entered her brain. She was not wicked, Merivel. She was ill. Mercifully for her, her body at last discharged from itself the source of her illness."

"I am glad for her," I said flatly.

"And so to you, my dear friend. Now I shall tell you what I perceive has happened. You are possessed by one thought: you wish the King to draw you back to him and to love you. In the absence of this love, you are literally mad with grief. And in time this madness will work horribly in you, so that you will become, like the woman I've just spoken of, a defiler. True, you may not daub others with excrement, but you will daub them with hate. Unless you can come to see your ache for the King's favours as a morbid affliction from which you must rid yourself or die."

Pearce stopped on the road and reached out and placed his bony hands on my shoulders. I opened my mouth to speak, but he went on:

"What happened this morning, those harsh words that were spoken, I can only see as beneficial, Merivel. Do not stop me, but listen! In this knowledge, the knowledge that the King has never loved you, only used you, as I long suspected, lies the only hope of your cure. For this knowledge must be the beneficial evacuation of nature, the rank and putrified stool which, foul as it is, carries out and away the far fouler source of poison and decay – the great worm of hope."

I stared at Pearce. I was unable to speak, so filled was I suddenly with belief in the rightness of what he had said. I could only nod my head and keep nodding it up and down, as if I were a stupid jester trying to jingle the bells on his hat.