Restoration by Rose Tremain

Author:Rose Tremain
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Part Two

15

Robert

A month has passed. April has come. And it is as if, during this month, since my arrival at Whittlesea Hospital, I have been absent from myself. This morning, however, seeing my reflection in the parlour window I once again caught sight of him: the man you know all too well by this time; the person I asked you to picture wearing a scarlet suit; the Fool Merivel. And I could not prevent a sentimental tenderness towards Merivel from creeping over my skin, causing me to blush both with affection and with shame. It is this tenderness that has led me to continue the story, notwithstanding the dismaying fact that when I passed through the gates of the New Bedlam, I passed from one life into another and thus an ending of some kind has been reached. Under these things you may draw a line: my house at Bidnold, the colours of my park, Celia’s face at my table. Neither you nor I will see them again. They have been consumed, not by actual flames, as were my dear parents, but by the fire of the King’s displeasure. I must thus imagine them turned to ash, and so must you, for you will not be returned to them.

I have become Robert.

No one at Whittlesea (not even Pearce, whom I must address as John) calls me Merivel and many do not even know that this is my name. I am not even Sir Robert. I am Robert. And this is how you may picture me: I do not wear my wig except at Meetings (these are most strange yet moving things, which I will later describe), I go about my work wearing black woollen breeches and a black woollen shirt which causes a vexatious itching of my nipples. These garments are covered by a leather apron, very heavy, that comes down to my knees. My boots are low-heeled and of sturdy hide and ever soiled with the mud of Whittlesea, which is like no other mud I have seen, being blackish and slimy and drying – when it does dry – to a sulphurous yellow crust. My belly, grown very fat upon Cattlebury’s carbonados and syllabubs, is shrinking on the poor diet of herring, frumenty, spoon-meat and water favoured by Pearce and Ambrose and the other Quakers. Even as a child, I was a mighty eater and the thinness of the food on which I am here forced to live causes me a deal of misery. Two pigeons are roosting in the poplar trees outside the Bedlam gate and I would dearly love to see their plump breasts roasted and set before me on a plate. But such thoughts I set aside, as I must also set aside a yearning (almost perpetual) to saddle Danseuse and ride away from here. For where should I ride to? All paths, outside this place, lead back to the King. This, at least, I have been permitted to understand. And so I remain, having no glimpse of any future.

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