Merivel A Man of His Time (19 page)

I tried to hold in my mind to that moment in the Drama of King Lear, where the poor mad Monarch is cured of his confusions
by sleep
and wakes to find his daughter Cordelia at his side and, after a while, recognises her, whom he has not seen in a long and cruel while, and cries out: ‘Do not laugh at me, For as I am a man, I think this Lady to be my child, Cordelia’ and she replies, ‘And so I am, I am.’ And upon this last repetition of the words ‘I am’ – if they be well said by the Actor – I can never hold back my tears, for what moves me most in the World is seeing that which was once lost to us restored.

I roused Margaret gently, and she opened her eyes and looked at me. I helped her to sit up a little.

‘Margaret,’ I said. ‘The King is come to Bidnold. He laid his hands upon your head and prayed to God to make you well. So now you will be well.’

She said nothing, but only looked at me with the compassion invalids often feel for those who nurse them. I stroked her hand.

‘I have made an Infusion for you, to calm your mind. Will you try to take a little?’

I held the cup to her lips and she took small sips, like a child. The
skin
of her face was pale, but yet with some blush of sleep on it, and her hand was warm and dry.

I began to relate to her how the King had sent no word of his arrival, but arrived like Jove Descending in his Chariot at the gate, forcing Will to such a stumbling and tottering rush to the front door that his heart almost ceased before he could appear at the King’s side.

‘But appear he did, Margaret,’ I said, ‘and to his great joy, as he tried to make his bow, His Majesty raised him up and said: “Gates! Our very excellent man! How glad we are to see you!” And Will’s heart almost stopped a second time from wonder. Imagine the scene …’

I watched her face carefully, to see whether she had understood my little account.

For a moment her features did not move at all, but then the ghost of a Smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I am glad,’ she said.

I helped her to drink half the cup of Hellebore, after which she lay back on her pillow and would take no more. She closed her eyes again. I sat without moving, asking myself whether, in any degree, I believed that a King can cure his subjects of grave maladies, and I knew that, in all truth, I did not believe it.

Yet neither could I assent to the idea that the King’s arrival at my house was to be entirely without some beneficial Consequence. I knew that had Pearce been here he would have said: ‘Once again, Merivel, you enter a state of Delusion. Doctors may aid healing, but Kings do not. And only God cures.’ To which I would have replied: ‘I know, my friend. I believe that even the King himself knows that. And yet, perhaps you leave out a vital consideration: the power of the mind to entertain those Delusions that sustain it.’

Considering the unreliability of Cattlebury and Will’s inability to supervise him, the Supper that appeared in the Dining Room was far from lamentable.

The candles had been lit. Everything was clean and shimmering. The King sat with Bunting on his lap and fed her morsels of Roasted Duck and the somewhat overcooked Chine. Cattlebury’s Game Pie came decorated with a pastry Crown, filled with shining Marmalade
and
set with Currants, as though with jewels – a courteous little act of repentance, I fervently hoped, for his outbreak of anti-Monarchist feeling.

For a while, disconcertingly, His Majesty talked to the dog and not to me, but I knew better than to interrupt him. It seemed to me that something important was turning in his mind and I was not wrong. At length, as the Pie was broached, he raised his eyes to me and said: ‘I have not told you, Merivel, how tired I am. I do not mean from my journey to Norfolk, which – once we were clear of the curtilage of London, which is much contaminated by Poverty – gave me great gladness, but from Matters of State.’

‘I can imagine that, Sir,’ I said.

‘The very sight of any Business – fees unpaid to the Navy men, money owing for a thousand other things, Petitions from this or that Society or Guild – makes me feel ill. There are mornings when, after my little Constitutional in the Park, all I am capable of doing is going to Fubbsy’s apartments and lying down by the fire and having her stroke my head, so terribly does it ache.’

‘Maladies of the head are hard to bear. I know it well.’

‘I could almost wish – and I have never in my life had such a thought before – that somebody else could be King.’

‘That would never do, Sir. None that I can think of have the Legs for it.’

The King smiled and took a drink of wine.

‘There are so few, so
very few
at Court who entertain me any more, Merivel. All is Gravity and Reproach. I am even supposed to be making war with France! All bound together with the Dutch and their competitive mania for Trade Monopolies. But wherefore would I do such a thing, when the only money I have to call my own comes from loans from King Louis?’

‘War is a bitter scourge …’

‘Quite so. I will not go to war – with France or with anyone else. What I long for is peace.’

Bunting, at this moment feeling herself neglected, began to whine for a morsel of pie. While this was safely procured for her I said: ‘You know that you are welcome to stay at Bidnold for as long as you want …’

The King stroked the dog and looked at me. ‘I was coming to this,’ he said. ‘I have always found this place very comforting. I was intending to go back to London tomorrow morning, but I feel that I simply cannot do it. I need sleep and fresh air. I shall remain at Bidnold.’

I bowed and said I was honoured, which I was. But in the next moment, taking in the true implications of the King’s announcement, I was also mightily discomfited. For Bidnold – what with the Infirmity of Will and the Mortal Illness of Margaret, the absence of provisions after the great snow, not to mention the seditious utterings of Cattlebury – was not really in any state to endure the prolonged Presence of the King.

I myself was weary and worn down. It was going to be difficult for me to be attentive to the Sovereign when all my thoughts were with Margaret. I was also undergoing great tidal fluctuations of guilt about my neglect of my Patients. My excuse, in these recent times, had been that I should stay away from them lest I be a carrier of the Typhus. But the truth was that during my absence in France, and in the long and terrible cold winter, I had given them virtually no thought, blithely assuming that old Dr Murdoch (that Quack!) and Dr Sims were doing their best for them, and that they had explained to them my great predicament in regard to my daughter’s sickness.

But I had hoped to make amends very soon by visiting them, every one, and now I saw that, more than ever, I was Captive in my house and that all my endeavours would have to be for Margaret and for the King alone. Habitually, the King arrived here with sufficient of the Court to entertain him and I could play the quiet Host, popping up with jests and fooleries, as required or requested, from time to time. But here he was at Bidnold with only two Valets and a spoilt dog for company. I began anxiously to wonder how we might pass the coming days.

When we left the Dining Room the King stopped and turned and looked back at the table, and at all the fifty candles dripping and burning. ‘Where is Gates?’ he said. ‘Was he not always faithful to the serving of Supper?’

‘Yes, he was, Sir,’ I said, ‘but his hands are become a little unsteady …’

The King nodded gravely. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I believe you told me that in London. But I do so much dislike it when things I have appreciated come to an end.’

15

SPRING CAME IN
.

Each day, as it spread its sugaring of green on every tree and hedgerow, I saw signs of Amelioration in Margaret’s condition. She began to eat the small, tempting meals I persuaded Cattlebury to make for her: milk puddings, coddled eggs, celery hearts baked with cream. The colour crept back into her cheeks.

I made sure that her hair was washed and curled, as she liked it to be.

Sometimes I helped her to rise from her bed, and we would sit at a little table in front of the window of the room where she’d lain for so long and play a few games of Rummy, and I saw from these that her mind was sharp and clear. To the heartless God who had let my innocent parents perish in a fire I expressed my gratitude.

I unearthed my tarnished oboe from its case, shined it up and, to Margaret’s amusement – and the King’s – led my daughter down to the Music Room and played for the two of them some of the old, badly remembered melodies with which I once entertained the mad of Whittlesea. At one of these sessions the King stood up and took Margaret by the hand, and led her to a short but stately dance, after which we three applauded enthusiastically, as though we had been at some marvellous new Drama at the Duke’s Playhouse.

I sent word to Sir James Prideaux of Margaret’s recovery and invited his family to dine with us, and when the women understood that the King was here and would be part of the company they all – so Sir James wrote to me – requested new dresses and
new
ribbons and new shoes, ‘and your soirée will quite bankrupt me, Merivel, but of course I do not care a whit, such is our rejoicing to meet the King and to know that Margaret is with us again in the world’.

They came in and filled the house with conversation and laughter. Each in turn embraced Margaret and Mary wept with such joy to see her friend restored that Arabella had to hide her face with her fan to conceal her own tears.

To the King, the family gave great and immediate delight. Though he had made much of telling me how ‘staid and comfortable’ he was with Fubbsy, I could at once perceive that the arrival of four beautiful young women in my house lit up his eye with its old Fire.

Penelope was but fifteen, but to her as well as to Mary, Jane and Virginia, he showed the kindest attention, impressing upon her the importance of her lessons in Dancing and Geography. ‘Grace
in
the world, Penelope, and Knowledge
of
the world,’ he said to her, ‘my Father taught me to value these things, before his Head was unkindly cut off. Therefore, in his name, you must pay attention to them.’ And all the company fell silent and we did not know where to look, and it was as well that Will (at last divested of his badger Tabard and wearing a suit of red-and-gold Livery too large for his bones) came in at that moment to tell me that the net that I had requested for a game of Shuttlecock had been rigged up in the hall.

We took turns to play in different teams and whoever played in the King’s team won, for that his agility had diminished little since I used to play Tennis with him, and his strokes were very strong and keen. But nobody seemed to mind who won or who lost. Our capering about with Racquets, chasing a Feathered Ball, brought to our hearts an extraordinary gladness, and though we were short of breath and thirsty, and I had to send to the kitchen for Ale and Lemonade, we did not want these games to end.

At midnight we were still playing. The only spectators were Arabella and Margaret, who was not yet strong enough to run about and sweat and risk a fever, but they, too, were caught by the laughter in the game and sat by the guttering candles, sipping Lemonade and cheering on the teams. And I thought how there
had
not been an evening as sweet as this one at Bidnold for many a long time, and how it was as if all my Melancholy had been swept from my heart and sent by the Shuttlecock into some faraway void.

True to what he said he would do, the King spent long hours walking alone in the Park in the early sunshine and as many quietly resting in the Marigold Room. ‘I am at peace,’ he kept repeating to me, ‘I am at peace in this place.’

Letters followed him, more and more as the days passed, but he did not open them. He said that the very word ‘Parliament’ made him feel faint, ‘as though I were a youth again and in Exile’, and he made me vow never to utter it.

He spent the evenings dining with me and with whatever amusing Company I could procure for him, including my Lady Bathurst, my former Amour, Violet, now widowed and quite aged, yet still beautiful in a ruined kind of way and with her Wit as sharp as ever it was.

And one evening, after we had drunk a great quantity of wine, the King took her to his bed, and when I myself retired some time later, I (and no doubt Margaret, as well as all the Servants at Bidnold) heard the familiar shouting and screaming of Violet Bathurst, who could not find herself touched by a man without making of it an almost ungovernable Riot.

At breakfast the following morning the King did not appear. Violet, looking pale, and with a fine Bruise on her neck, and drinking weak Cinnamon Tea, turned to me and said: ‘I did not tell you, Merivel, that I am dying.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we are all dying, Violet …’

‘But I am dying more utterly than you. There is a Cancer in my breast.’

I was eating Porridge. I looked at its grey lumpishness and felt my gorge rise. Before I could say anything Violet said: ‘Now that I have been fucked by the King, I can die happy. Is this not so?’

She was smiling her familiar, challenging smile, which used to cast an agreeable spell over me, but to which I now felt myself to be almost immune.

‘How can you be sure that what you have is a Cancer?’ I said.

‘Well, it is great
Thing
near my armpit, which should not be there. What else might it be? But I did not let the King’s hands discover it and he took, I think, much pleasure in me, as once you did, too.’

‘I have no doubt he did.’

‘But he may not come to me again …’

‘Why not?’

‘I believe I exhausted him!’

Margaret came into the Dining Room at this moment, so Violet and I ceased to talk of these things. Margaret said ‘Good Morning’ to Violet, but would not look at her, being, I think, embarrassed to have overheard the night’s frenzy and not knowing whether all Normality in the house was henceforth to be altered by it. When Violet announced her departure, my daughter looked relieved.

I accompanied Violet to the door. As she left the house I said to her: ‘I will come to Bathurst Hall tomorrow and examine your breast. Perhaps what you have is a mere Cyst, which I can drain.’