Merivel A Man of His Time (18 page)

I repeat this, helplessly, many times, with my head buried in Margaret’s pillow and my arms enfolding her frail body. ‘
I do not know how I shall bear it!
’

And then, in my damp darkness, I hear an answering Voice. The Voice is hushed, almost inaudible. It says: ‘You shall not need to bear it, Merivel.’

I try to restrain my sobs and raise my head from the pillow.

The room is dark, with the curtains drawn against the spring day, and only a solitary candle burning. I wipe my eyes on a corner
of
Margaret’s sheet and look towards the door, and I see a tall figure standing there, dressed all in Black and with a white wrapping binding his face. And I think that I am in the presence of Death, who has come, unheard, into the room, and all my flesh turns cold.

Death moves very slowly and walks towards the bed. And I catch the scent of him as he nears me; but, strangely, Death does not smell of any foul Thing, but of the most beautiful and refined Perfume. I breathe in this Perfume and know that it is familiar to me, but I cannot remember from when or where.

I wipe my eyes again to try to see more clearly. Death stands motionless at the bedside of my child. He wears black gloves. Above the white Muslin binding his face, his eyes regard me with a fierce Intensity. ‘Merivel,’ he says. ‘I will touch her, as I touch men for the Pox. If the King touches, God very often saves.’

Weak from my weeping, I stumble to my feet. I try to execute my oft-practised bow, but I have to reach out my hand to stop myself from falling onto the bed.

‘Your Majesty …’ I stammer. ‘I mistook you for Death.’

‘Did you?’ says the King. ‘How interesting. Monarchs and Death are both burdened with Dread. I expect that is the reason.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘There is no Dread of you in my heart.’

‘Good. I did not think there was.’

‘Only a very obstinate love.’

‘That I know. It is, of course, why I am here. So let us both be silent a moment. And then I will touch Margaret and we will pray, and you shall see that in a short space of time she will recover. Kings must believe in their own Power or they are lost. In this belief is all their strength and might. And this I know from my long years of Exile. Even sheltering in my Oak Tree at Boscobel, with all my battles lost, I knew it.’

I try to stand very silent and still, but I am aware that my nose is running, and that a dribble of mucus is coursing down over my lips to my chin and beyond onto my collar. I have no rag with which to wipe it away, so I use the sleeve of my coat, and it is only then that I recall that I am wearing an old, frayed brown Garment that I like to put on when I make solitary visits to my
garden,
it seeming to be the nearest thing I own to a kind of Camouflage, wearing which I feel free to talk to the Hornbeams and the Beeches. I feel ashamed to be in such poor attire before the King, but I cannot give this shame any attention, for I know that it has no importance. What is occurring in the room is so unexpected, so extraordinary, that I know I must give it all my soul. And as if to reinforce this knowledge, I glance over to the door and suddenly catch sight of Will, hung about as always with his Badger Tabard, kneeling on the floor with his hands clenched in prayer.

The King moves close to the bed. Margaret opens her eyes and they flicker with some kind of Recognition, then close again. The gloved hands reach out and, folded one upon the other, alight on Margaret’s forehead.

‘Kings have no Power of Healing,’ says King Charles, ‘but God has that Power and He may work through us. In God’s name, I touch you, Margaret. May God heal you and make you well.’

‘Amen,’ murmurs Will.

‘Amen,’ say I.

14

THE KING INTENDED
to stay no more than one night at Bidnold, and so had arrived with a very small Retinue consisting of two Coachmen, one Officer of the Royal Guard, two Valets and one dog, his favourite Spaniel bitch, Bunting.

He and Bunting were lodged in the room that used to be called the Marigold Room, where once Celia had lain, complaining all the while about my vulgar decorations and my absence of taste. But the King admires this room, upholstered now in a flaming sunset of corals and magentas, only cooled a little by an abundance of cream satin cushions. It has a very beautiful view of the Park and, as he entered there once again, the King said: ‘Ah, yes. Here I am at Peace. Now I shall rest awhile.’

Leaving Tabitha with Margaret, I summoned all my servants and gave instructions for a bounteous Feast to be cobbled together before evening, so that the King might dine in as much splendour as my house could afford, given so brief a notice.

To Cattlebury’s suggestion of ‘a rich game pie with Marmalade’ I said: ‘If you will, Cattlebury, but then let us
navigate
around the pie with oysters and anchovies, and a saddle of Lamb with a Madeira Sauce, and a Chine of Beef, and follow it all with a Rum Syllabub and baked Apples. His Majesty has travelled a long while to be with us and will be as hungry as a lion.’

‘Or as a Bear, you should have said, Sir,’ remarked Cattlebury. ‘If you ask me, that creature will be devouring deer before the spring is out.’

‘Thank you, Cattlebury,’ I said. ‘I am always interested in opinions.
Now.
I wish the Dining Room to be thoroughly cleaned and polished as to woodwork, silverware and Pewter, and all the best Linen got from the chests and ironed and laid out. Nobody shall rest or stop for one moment till everything is shining and clean. And I want fifty candles lit before Supper is served. Both His Majesty and I are fond of light.’

I then took Will aside into the Servants’ Pantry and said gently: ‘Will, the time has come to take off your Tabard. This evening you will put on your best Livery, so that you may serve the King at table.’

Will picked up a corner of his Tabard, and looked at the Moth holes and the Mange with which it was afflicted, and shook his head sadly. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I swore I would not take this off until Miss Margaret was well again. Of what use was my promise if I now break it?’

I regarded him, stooped and sad as he was, with almost as much decay on him as was on the Badger skin, and saw that the day had come when I could not let him perform any more duties in the Dining Room, for that he could not hold the plates and dishes up.

And so I perceived, not without some feeling of shame, that his insistence on his wearing of the Tabard had saved me, perhaps, from a Catastrophe of spilled oysters and dropped sauce boats, from a general mortifying supper-time Chaos, and so I said: ‘Very well, Will. An oath is an oath and you are an honourable man. Keep on the Tabard. Only—’

‘I know, Sir Robert, I cannot appear at table. I would give the world to serve His Majesty again, but I will stay out of sight.’

After a hastily assembled luncheon, the King invited me to take a turn in the Park with him.

In the strong sunshine I could very clearly see the creases that Time had engraved on the King Charles’s face and I saw, too, that his skin – always a very sweet Caramel colour – had become pale and spotted with liver stains, and I wanted to protest at these signs of ageing: at the Discord they engendered in my mind, which childishly believed the King to be ageless and immortal.

I led him first to my pleached Hornbeam Alley, which he admired, professing himself enamoured of the ‘French style of gardens, where everything is Geometry and Order’, and I began to relate to him (for that I knew of his abiding interest in the state of other people’s hearts) how, in Paris, I had fallen in love with a woman ‘of infinite learning in regard to plants’.

‘Ah,’ said the King, ‘how delicate of you, Merivel. I would not have taken you for a man who could be seduced by Botany.’

‘Nor I,’ said I, ‘but then, all my life I have been surprised by what moved me. It is as though, despite the excellent exhortations by Montaigne for men to “know themselves”, I still do not comprehend my own Nature.’

‘Very probable. But the reason may well be that you still yearn to entertain and surprise yourself. Am I not right?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I yearn to surprise and entertain
you
.’

‘Ha! How considerate of you. And you succeed most of the time. But this Paramour in Paris, do you amuse her?’

‘I believe I do, Sir. But I am endeavouring to forget her. Her husband is a Colonel in the Swiss Guards and he has threatened to kill me with his sword the moment I show my face at his house …’

‘Oh, how infantile! Mistresses should be married and husbands should know their place – as once you learned, to your cost. Perhaps the Swiss Guards stand too much on Dignity, do they?’

Into my mind came an image of Colonel Jacques-Adolphe de Flamanville, sniffing and snorting as he massacred me at Billiards, and I said that the maintenance of his Dignity did indeed appear to count strongly with him and that I had nicknamed him ‘the Giraffe’. But in fairness to his fellow soldiers, I also conjured for the King (who, of late, did not enjoy going beyond the shores of England and so had not seen Versailles for some time) the Stoicism of the Swiss Guards, standing so still in the frozen moonlight and playing their drums with such infinite softness that the sound seemed, almost, to ascend out of the ground.

‘This I like,’ he said. ‘When the strong restrain their strength and are subtle.’

We walked on and came soon enough to the newly built Stockade, inside which the Bear was pacing round and round.

The King stopped, and held to the wooden posts of the Stockade and regarded the Bear with fierce attention. Bunting began to bark and he picked her up and cradled her in his arms till she was quiet.

‘Does the creature have a name?’ he asked after a while.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I cannot think of a name substantial enough.’

The King smiled, then in silence watched the Bear, as it lumbered away from us and came to a place of uneasy rest beneath a tree branch. Then he said: ‘I believe his name should be Clarendon, like my former bear-leader. The animal is Cast Out and alone. He may soon enough die.’

I was shocked for a moment. I had no wish to entertain the thought that my Bear would ‘soon enough die’. But then I looked at the stricken creature and remembered how the affluent, pompous old Earl and Chancellor, who had believed he would be at the King’s side to advise him and guide him all his life, in the end
outlasted his own usefulness
.

And so Clarendon, who had risen so high and made so mighty a Fortune, was sent away into France and never returned to inhabit the great house he had built for himself. Lady Castlemaine and others at Court laughed and rejoiced at his disgrace, and his Coat of Arms was defiled, and a charge of Treason (never put) began to circulate about his absent person.

The King, who had been driven into fury by Clarendon’s over-bearing presence for so long, at first joined in the mockery and derision of a man who had advised him all his life, but some years later, after Clarendon had died at Montpelier, he compared him to Shakespeare’s Falstaff and himself to Prince Hal. ‘I was cruel,’ he said. ‘Clarendon died of heartbreak. I should not have punished him so completely.’

Now, the thought that my Bear, whose saviour I had imagined myself to be, was enduring some kind of terrible Exile here at Bidnold caught me in a sudden sorrow. I saw that I had not been able to give the creature one moment’s happiness. I had saved it from death; that was all.

‘Was I wrong to save its life?’ I asked.

The King held the dog close to him, as though for his own comfort as much as for her protection, and asked: ‘Why did you
want
to save it, Merivel?’

‘I believe I thought it might play a part …’

‘In what?’

‘In my future understanding of my own Nature.’

The King turned and looked at me. It was a look of unconcealed Disdain, that I remembered from long ago and which caused me sudden pain, for in it I always and ever saw reflected my own Inadequacy.

‘I see you have not lost the habit of turning all Things towards yourself,’ he said with a sniff.

We returned to the house and ascended to Margaret’s room. She was sleeping.

We stood and watched. Her sleep appeared calm and Tabitha told us that she had taken some of the Milk Posset before closing her eyes once more. Her thin, bandaged arm lay still, in an attitude of surrender, on her pillow. Each of us touched this languorous arm, then the King, whose mood was now sombre, went to rest once more and I descended to the Kitchen, where I found Cattlebury cleaving the heads from a brace of Mallard Duck.

‘I did not order Duck,’ I said.

‘No, Sir Robert,’ replied the impudent cook, ‘but they walked of their own accord into my larder and I says to them, “You are done for, my lads!” And they quacks back to me, “Will the King eat us?” And I says, for that I am a Man of Wit – as I hope you have noticed, Sir Robert, over all these years – “The King eats everything in the land, so why should you be spared?”’

‘What did you mean by that – “the King eats everything in the land”?’

‘Only what I say, Sir. If famine comes, will the King starve? No. He will take from the people the little that they have, to stuff his own gob.’

‘Be quiet, Cattlebury!’ I cried out. ‘I will not have seditious talk under this roof.’

Cattlebury left the Duck and came towards me, brandishing the
meat
cleaver. As I flinched away from him he said: ‘He will be your ruin, too, Sir Robert. Mr Pearce was always right, the King will be your ruin.’

I went out into the garden and gathered some Hellebore leaves. I had imagined these plants so wounded and suffocated by the frost and snow that they would be brown and dead, but they were not.

I made an Infusion of Hellebore and Honey – another recipe of Pearce’s, for the benign treatment of mental infirmity, used to some effect at Whittlesea. I took this up to Margaret’s room, where Tabitha had resumed her watch. I apologised to the girl for shouting at her before and told her to go and rest.

Margaret had not moved at all in her sleep. It was as if, since the appearance of the King at her bedside, she had been cast into a gentle Oblivion, such as once afflicted her Mother, and I prayed that she would not slide from this into Death.