Merivel A Man of His Time (42 page)

I mumbled that I was glad, although, to me, one Church or None can make no difference to what awaits the King, and that is the Nothingness from which we came and to which we again return.

Huddleston sat by me on the settle and I found his presence comforting, and I said to him: ‘Father, when the King is gone I shall be lost. I shall have no Direction.’

He put his hand on my shoulder, but said nothing, for knowing me even a little, he understood that this was entirely
true
, so what could he say in the way of any Comfort? And I honoured him for this. One of the things I do detest in the world is people making Light of my Sorrows and saying ‘now, now, be of good cheer’ and altogether telling me to feel what I cannot feel and consoling me where Consolation there is none.

We sat silently there for a long time. Father Huddleston took off his borrowed wig and examined it for fleas and lice. He found a flea, but did not kill it, but only brushed it away. Then at length he said: ‘Sorrow makes one weary. Why do you not go and sleep a little?’

I replied that I had pledged in my heart to Keep Watch until the King was gone, but Huddleston said: ‘He wishes to be alone for a Space, to ponder what he has done today. So I advise you to sleep now, in the case that you may be needed in the night, or on the morrow.’

I did as he suggested, returned to my half-empty room and lay down. As the afternoon came on I saw snow falling. Sleep came and went, and came again and went again.

I rose towards four o’clock and found Fubbs supervising the taking away of her Trunks, and said to her: ‘Your Grace, I am upset that my Surgical Instruments have been mistaken for Possessions of yours and put into the luggage. May we call the Trunks back?’

‘What Instruments?’ she shrieks at me. ‘What would I want with Surgical Instruments?’

‘They were stowed in my Night Table. They are the Tools of my Trade and a gift from the King, and most precious to me …’

‘I have not seen them. The Trunks are gone. All that they contain belongs
to me
and to no one else. You must have dropped your instruments carelessly in the street.’

Carelessly in the street!

‘Duchess,’ say I, ‘no such thing is possible. The instruments have been by my side, and barely out of my sight, for
twenty years
. They were stowed beside my bed. I have not moved them from there. But now they are gone.’

‘And you are accusing me of stealing them for my own use?’

‘I am accusing you of nothing. All I know is that something that is very precious to me has been inadvertently taken away. Please may we ask the Servants to bring in the Trunks again …’

‘No, we may not!
Mon dieu, quelle histoire pour un petit rien!
The Trunks contain my Goods and nothing else, and they must be sent to the Embassy now, without delay, or everything I own will be taken from me. So please do not trouble me with this petty concern of yours.’

‘Your Grace,’ say I, ‘in all humility, this is not a “petty concern” …’

‘Yes, it is! I marvel that, at such a time, you can think only of yourself! Surgical instruments may be purchased afresh, but if my possessions are taken from me I will not have the means to replace them. The Trunks are leaving now, so please let me hear no more of this matter.’

In her fury to pack and in her Great Sadness, Fubbsy had, here and there across the afternoon, fortified herself with tipples of wine and these tipples had become so numerous that she was now quite categorically inebriated, and could not walk without stumbling, nor focus her eyes upon any Thing, and her breath was very pungent.

I went to her side and took her arm to steady her and said gently: ‘I will go after the Trunks and search them as they travel …’

Tearing away her arm, Fubbs exhaled a malodorous puff of wine vapour and shrieked: ‘What! And steal much else besides and strip me of things I love, as you are stripping me of Margaret?’

‘I am not “stripping” you of Margaret, Duchess,’ I said. ‘Margaret does not want to be parted from Julius Royston, and that is the sum of it.’

‘All I asked was that she come with me to France and see me settled. But no, she will not. I thought she had a kind heart, but I see now that, like you, she thinks only of herself!’

Though I was now very cross with the Duchess, I saw that it was of no avail to argue further with her. As she took yet another gulp of wine, I left the room and went down into the courtyard, where the Trunks were being loaded onto a wooden cart. Here I endeavoured to explain my loss of my precious instruments to the Servants charged with seeing the luggage safely brought to the French Embassy, but they did not seem willing to listen to me.

At length I produced a Purse containing three shillings and, given that the number of attendant Servants was two, I showed them that this made a neat Mathematic of a shilling and sixpence each, if they would let me ride in the cart and look for my instruments as we travelled along.

Hastily they took the money and bundled me in, and the horse set off at a foolish, lumbering gallop along the icy roads.

35

I DO NOT
know where we were when the cart was brought to its calamity.

One moment I was kneeling on the floor of the conveyance, searching in the topmost trunk, among bundles of silver forks and a fine array of Cream Jugs, Pepper Pots, Salt Cellars and Wine Coasters for my lost Instruments, and in the next second did I realise that the cart was tilting, like a barque in a violent storm.

I clutched at the sides of it, as though attempting to steady both it and myself within it, but neither was to be steadied. The heavy trunks slid towards me and all toppled sideways into the gutter – cart and horse, Servants, Merivel and luggage – and lay there unable to move, as though a mighty wave had crashed upon us.

I was aware of my head hitting the hard road and then of some heavy Thing falling upon my ankle. And that is all that I remember.

I woke in a cold, dim room.

There was a stench in it, sufficient, almost, to make me retch, yet strangely familiar to me. Noises, as of Animals in pain, reverberated around me. I fancied I was in a Zoo.

I tried to remain conscious by wondering what specimens this Zoo contained.

I imagined Ostriches and Camels, Hyenas and Crocodiles. I longed to hear the cheeping of baby birds, fancying that this sound, which was the sound of Spring and of life returning, would console me.

‘Sip-sip, sip-sip … come to me, sweet chicks …’ I murmured.

Then I was swallowed once more, like Jonah by the Whale, into the belly of darkness and nothingness.

When next I came to my senses an old woman in a blue-cloth gown was standing over me and pulling my eyelids about to see into my eyes. Then her hands moved upwards to my head and began to fuss with something there, and I became aware of a most dreadful Ache in my skull and a dryness in my throat that was almost insupportable.

The Zoo still cried out all around me. I fancied I could hear Lions and Monkeys, and the terrible repetitive shrieking of a Peacock.

‘What Zoo is this?’ I managed to ask the blue-cloth crone.

‘Zoo!’ she said. ‘Lord love us! Stay still, good man, and do not speak.’

I reached up and clutched her arm. ‘What place am I in?’ I said.

She looked at me more kindly then. She was elderly and poor, with her hair drawn into an unfashionable strangulated Bun on the top of her head, but with something of tenderness in her eyes. ‘You are in St Thomas’s Hospital,’ she said, ‘and you are lucky to be alive. You were found spilled onto the road.’

St Thomas’s Hospital
.

I had not been inside this wretched institution since Pearce and I worked long hours here, when we were learning the Physician’s trade, after finishing our Anatomical Studies in Cambridge. I had not thought – because that this is a hospital for the Poor – ever to be a Patient in St Thomas’s, trusting to Fortune that I would never be
poor enough
to get shelter here. But here I was.

I turned my aching head, looked about me and saw, indeed, that I was lying on a thin mattress on a wooden bed, with numberless other mortals of a Poor kind of disposition laid out beside me in a reeking Ward.

The air in the room was damp, as though the sun never reached it. On the stone floor had been strewn a quantity of straw, now much mixed with excrement, as in a cattle byre. The Animal noises came from the mouths and Arses of the Sick, all closeted together here, covered only with thin blankets, or else creeping about, like starving dogs and crying, and many passing the time by farting and defecating
into
tin bowls. Round these bowls, among the saturated straw, scuttled a lively quantity of mice.

I had had it in mind to ask the woman for a cup of water, but she was no longer by me. In the next bed to mine lay a sleeping man, very thin, with his head shaved for the application of Cantharidic Plasters and the deep Scurf of some ancient Pox still visible upon his face. Spittle bubbled up from his mouth, and oiled his chin and his straw-stuffed pillow. And I remembered how Pearce had always been very severe towards all victims of the Pox, looking me in the eye and saying: ‘Men who court their own misery by lechery get the fate they deserve.’

Yet for all this remembered severity, I wished Pearce might be by my side now. I wished he might lift me up and get me away from here, and lay me down in my soft bed at Bidnold and watch over me, as I once watched over him for thirty-seven hours. I wished he might sit quietly by me, his white hands playing softly upon his china soup ladle, as though it might have been a lute. I wished he might bring me water and food.

Reaching up and touching my head, I discovered a Bandage there, and the touching of this Bandage brought back into my mind how I had been in the cumbersome cart with Fubbsy’s Trunks, and how we had met with catastrophe on our way to the Embassy.

I could not know, from the ache in my head, how broken or cracked it might be, but I knew that I was not gone into Madness, for that my thoughts now began to turn upon whether I might find it in me to rise up and walk out of this place. I was horribly aware that my poor Margaret would be worried on my account. Fubbs had had no idea that I had boarded the cart with the Trunks and, all befuddled by wine as she was and angry with me, and distraught with sorrow, might have told Margaret any Thing of her choosing, viz. that I had taken flight for Norfolk or gone to drown myself in the river.

Pressing upon my arms, I lifted myself a little in the bed. Now I saw that laid next to my poor Pallet was a pair of shoes, which, though caked in malodorous gutter slime, I recognised as my own, and I looked about me for the rest of my clothes and my wig. All
that
I was wearing were my undergarments. My right ankle, I could now feel, was swathed in a bandage, but my feet were bare.

I could see no clothes anywhere in the vicinity of my bed. The cold in the Ward was very fierce. (Pearce and I had sometimes complained to the Nursing Sister about this, saying ‘how are your Patients to recover, if all their bodily energy must be put into shivering?’) But there seemed to be no means to ameliorate their lot. Winter was ever difficult to endure in this place.

Far down the room there was, in fact, a large fireplace, in which burned a few Coals, but scarce enough to make the colour of any flame and only sending out wisps of black smoke, which set everybody to coughing and retching. I pulled the thin blanket round me and, moving very slowly like an aged man, hoisted my feet onto the floor.

I stared at these feet and the legs to which they were attached. They did not look like my feet and legs, but indeed like those of a Pauper, as though, to contrive my entry into St Thomas’s, my own limbs had been cut off and undergone some fearful exchange with the lower extremities of a Vagrant. I could see, too, that my right leg (or the right leg of the Vagrant) was horribly swollen and the foot a fierce purple colour, and when I tried to stand up, a very malicious pain came up this leg and into my thigh.

From this I deduced that my ankle was either turned or broken and had not been set properly, and that getting about upon it was going to bring me the gift of weeks of pain. And that this pain should have been caused by Fubbsy’s Trunks, with their great weight of pewter, silver and gold falling onto my leg, made me more than ever understand how the Rich are detested by the poorest of the Poor, and how they might like to see our heads chopped off and put upon spikes on London Bridge.

Watched by the Scurfy man, now awake again and scratching himself all over, and breathing the vitiated air through his mouth, I managed the few steps that took me to the end of my bed. I then bent and peered underneath it, hoping to see there my shirt and coat and breeches, but all that I found was a little nest of straw and, lying in it and gone quite into Rigor Mortis, a dead cat.

This sight was so vivid and horrible that it reminded me on the
instant
of all the dead things Pearce and I had found in St Thomas’s during the time that we worked here, and upon which we sometimes practised Anatomical dissections.

These included numerous mice and rats, but also dogs, squirrels, foxes and sparrows. In the Operating Room, where the Cuttings for the Stone were performed, we came upon a dead seagull, and in the Privies a dead Monkey, dressed in a little Mountebank’s velvet coat. Of the human dead, taken out upon carts to Common graves, we lost count. Many of these lives we had attempted to save, but we had possessed neither the knowledge nor the means, and very often cursed our own profession for all its failures and shortcomings. Pearce, who had tried and failed to save his own mother, was always made angry by Death.

The pains in my leg and head being very severe, I now sat down again upon my bed and pondered what I might do, being thus hurt and almost naked as I was, and it was at this moment that I heard a new sound and that was the tolling of a bell.

I lifted my head to try to see out of the dirty window, but it was too high and all I could glimpse was the sky, which, after the snow that we had seen, was filled with an eerie brightness, sun and dappled cloud being in perfect Opposition, like lamplight trying to shine through a square of flannel, and this sight, for reasons that I know not, brought forth in me a feeling of profound melancholy.