Restoration (30 page)

At dinner, I was very quiet and pensive, so that Eleanor enquired: "Are you quite well today, Robert?" I replied that I was well enough but had discovered much, that morning, with which to occupy my mind. Ambrose looked at me benevolently and asked me to share my thoughts with the six Friends "if it may bring you help". I thanked him and said: "Alas, Ambrose, there is so little of the philosopher in me that it is very often the case that my mind is furiously at work upon some supposed great matter which, as soon as I try to put it into words, has the habit of flying out of the window." Edmund smiled. Daniel rose and ladelled a second helping of broth into our bowls. Pearce, dabbing at his thin lips with a coarse napkin, cast in my direction a look of disdain. (It has become a humiliating fact of my life at Whittlesea that, no matter what my mood is, Pearce behaves to me as if he were a mind reader, always knowing precisely what I am thinking.)

In the afternoon, it was the turn of the women of Margaret Fell to make their monotonous perambulation round the oak tree and I and Hannah were their overseers, walking round and round with them and conversing with them "on subjects that will gladden their hearts, such as the coming of spring and the sowing of the Whittlesea House vegetable plot with new lettuce and scarlet beans."

I fell into step beside Katharine and asked her how she regarded the oak, whether it was a thing of beauty or comfort to her, and she replied that she found it to be "quite full of a green death".

"What is this 'green death?" I said.

"It is in nature," she answered, "sometimes in a part of a thing and sometimes in all."

"Do you see it in people? Do you see it, now, in me?"

"No," she said. "In you I see a waft of death. But it is not green."

"What colour might this waft be, then?"

She stopped and regarded me, thus causing the women behind us to knock into us. I gently took her elbow and led her on. I assumed that, after she had thought about it a while, she would reply to my question, but she did not. Her mind had moved away from the subject and onto the thing which torments her night and day, her desertion by her husband while she was sleeping. She began to recount to me – for the twelfth or thirteenth time – how, if he had been a small man he would not have got away without causing her to wake, but being very tall was able to step over her body with one giant stride. And so she began to imitate him, lifting up her skirts and taking great huge awkward steps, causing some of the women to stop walking and watch her and laugh at her and point, as at a lying mountebank. I let her stride on. She calls this imitation of the man who betrayed her a "Leaving Step". She says every man on earth has his own Leaving Step and I often try to calm her rage by agreeing with her and telling her that the King, being very plagued by fools from whom he wishes to walk away, has perfected his Leaving Step into a walk of unsurpassed elegance. Several times, she has asked me to "show the walk" to her. But to make a poor imitation of the King is something I cannot bring myself to do.

The day was very brilliant and warm and we kept the women walking around the tree for longer than the allotted hour. When Katharine had tired of doing her Leaving Step, she came beside me again and after a while put out her hand and touched my shoulder and told me that the colour of the waft of death she saw in me was white. Had she said scarlet, which is a colour that affects me very much, as you will already have noticed, I would have been perturbed by the revelation.

But white was of no significance to me and so I immediately put the thing from my mind.

I did not know that on the evening of the twenty-first of April I was going to break my silence at the Meetings. Though very fascinated by the "truth" I had stumbled upon about the world's inability to try any cure upon the lunatic until he is -in all but a few cases – incurable, I had not planned to offer any discourse upon the subject until I had pondered what practical measures might be taken to remedy this situation. Still less had I plotted within myself to reveal to the Keepers my all-too-Merivelian ideas about the efficacy of weeping and sweating in the treatment of poisonous humours.

And yet, all these things came out of me. And the manner of their coming out was most memorable and strange.

I was seated at one edge of the little semi-circle we make at Meetings round the parlour fire. Near me, on an oak table, was a wooden bowl into which Pearce had put posies of primroses. There was utter silence in the room except for the crackling and spitting of the fire, and there is something about a Quaker silence which is absolute, as if Eternity were then and there beginning.

And in this quiet, I heard myself breathing in the smell of the flowers and after some minutes a certainty stole upon me that this perfume was slowly, with each breath of it that I took, being drawn up into my brain and there being alchemised into syllables and words. And it was not long before my brain seemed to be so full of words – as crammed with them as was the bowl with the primroses – that it began to hurt, and I put my head in my hands to try to get the hurt away. But it would not go. And so I opened my mouth and I began to speak, starting with the phrase, "It has come to me from the Lord," and in a perfectly logical fashion I set forth my argument, saying that madness may be born of many things but yet for all except those who are lunatic from their births there was a Time Before, a time when there was no madness in them and that this would be followed by a Growing Time or a Sickening Time, when the madness was coming upon them, precisely as all disease has a Growing Time. "And we," I said, "we the Keepers of those who are very far gone into a mad sickness, do we not all recognise that the men and women of William Harvey are much further from any help or cure than those in the other two houses? Likewise, is it not our daily fear to find an inhabitant of George Fox or Margaret Fell descended into an uncontrollable mad state, so that we would be forced to chain him up and put him in a pen in William Harvey? Thus we daily admit that madness is not a static thing but, just as all things in the world are changeful, so is madness and, like them, may change for the better or for the worse. But what we do not ask, dear Friends, is what were the Footsteps of each case of madness, in other words how it came there and when and in what manner it first showed itself, yet I, when I was a physician, was taught by the great medical minds of our age that few cures are likely to succeed unless each stage and symptom of a malady is understood. And this is what the Lord has revealed to me, that we should try with each one of those in our care to look back into past time and ask them to try to remember how it was to be in the Time Before and what thing or calamity came about to put them into the Sickening Time. And in this way we might discover the imprint of the steps to madness, there just under the surface, as the imprints of past ages lie under the surface of the earth…"

As I delivered myself of this long speech, I was not aware of how the others regarded it or me, but only of my need to get it out so that my brain would be free of it and no longer hurting in the press of words. I deliberately paused at this point and took in several great breaths and once more the scent of the primroses ascended to my brain and recommenced its alchemy and so I talked on, now making proposals, all of which, I said, had "come to me from Jesus Christ", for the questioning of all inmates of Whittlesea by the Keepers so that the Time Before might become visible to us. And I was entirely held now by my words, as if my words had become a liquid and I immersed in them, like a drowning man in a rushing river. So into the stream now poured all my outlandish things, my fantastical things, my cures by weeping and my cures by dancing, my suggestions for story-telling and the playing of music. As I spoke on these matters, I began to feel a merciful diminution of the pain in my head and so I lifted it up and talked on, staring at the fire, and in the flames of the fire I could see a most wondrous picture of Daniel, attired in the clothes of summer, playing a fiddle, and all the women of Margaret Fell skipping and dancing round him, seeming happy like children. And then the pain left me entirely and the picture vanished and I was silent.

I was very boiling hot. I took off my wig and wiped my face and my head with my handkerchief. I felt the eyes of the others upon me, but no one spoke. A full ten or fifteen minutes passed and the time allowed for the Meeting came to an end and Ambrose put his hands into his prayer steeple and mumbled: "Thank you, dear Lord, that in our presence Robert was moved to speak." And this is all that was said.

Mercifully, it was not my turn that night to take part in a Night Keeping, for as soon as we rose from our circle by the fire, I felt a shivering in my knees and a pain of exhaustion in my belly and I went to my bed and slept a deep, thick sleep from which I did not stir till morning.

When I woke, however, I felt in me a lightness of heart, such I has not experienced since my casting out from Bidnold. I could not account for it, but was most grateful to find it there. (I have, since I arrived here, found myself pondering the thing we call happiness, for which, the King once told me I had a gift. I now recognise that my supposed "gift" was much less of a thing than, say, Hannah's and Eleanor's, they being two of the most contented women I have ever met.)

It was my task, that morning, to work in the vegetable garden with Pearce, together with some six or seven men from George Fox. (I report in passing that Pearce is so fond of this plot, so proud of its drainage ditches and of the infant pear trees he is trying to grow
en espalier
on its southerly wall, that he likes to oversee all work done there and becomes very vaporous with irritation if his seedlings are not planted in absolutely straight lines.) The sun was once again shining and I would have found my duty in the garden quite pleasant had it not been for Pearce's behaviour towards me that morning, which was most irksome. He acted as one who wished to have nothing to do with me whatsoever, separating himself from any task in which I was occupied and replying most curtly to all my attempts to speak to him. Watching him from a distance planting beans, swooping down on a freshly raked patch of soil like a long-necked bird, using his long white fingers as a dibbling-stick, burying each bean most lovingly and moving on, I remembered how on our angling expeditions near Cambridge this mood of dislike for me would sometimes come over him. Then and now, I find it most hurtful and difficult to endure, particularly as I can seldom fathom what it is I have done to offend him. On this morning, however, I could only conclude that my outpouring of the previous evening had not been to his liking. Some hours – or even days – would probably pass; then Pearce would dissect my thesis with his clever pecking mind and lay it in ruins before me.

Meanwhile, as I plucked weeds from the onion bed, I began in a low voice, lest Pearce hear what I was doing, to talk to the man called Jacob Lowe who was working alongside me and to enquire of him what thing he most clearly remembered before coming to Whittlesea and whether, in his past life, he had some trade or calling. He told me he was a butcher and slaughterer. He described to me the ease with which he could split a calf's head and take out the tender brains. "But I was killed by a whore," he whispered. "I died of her foul cunt. And this is my second life on earth."

I requested him to describe his "death" to me. And he told me that his testicles had swollen and burst "being full of the pox" and out through these burst cods had poured his life.

I looked up at Jacob Lowe. His face was ruddy, his musculature good, his nose prominent and not one whit decayed. From these external signs, I felt it possible to conclude that, if he had once suffered from the pox, he was now cured of it. Such cures are rare but where they occur they have depended – in all cases I have witnessed – on the giving of
mecurius sublimate
, of which the chief element is mercury itself, that capricious metal to which I once likened the King. And mercury is, if the dose is not most carefully measured, a poison. I saw a man at St Thomas 's die of mercury poisoning and he died screaming and raving, as if a madness had suddenly come upon him. I smiled to myself and looked over to Pearce's stooping back. In the time it had taken me and Jacob Lowe to weed the onion patch, I had retraced the primary footsteps to this one man's lunacy.

Neither at dinnertime nor during the afternoon did any of the friends make reference to my speech of the evening before and Pearce's lack of charity towards me seemed to confirm that he at least had been most displeased by it. I thus kept quiet to myself my conversation with Jacob Lowe and waited for the Meeting to see if Ambrose might pass judgement upon my theory. But he did not mention it, and I confess I felt somewhat cast down to think that what had appeared to me as a revelation appeared to the Keepers of Whittlesea as a thing of no consequence at all. It was only some days later that I was to discover that their way with knowledge is a quiet way. They do not snatch at it or gobble it down; they take it into themselves slowly like a physic and let it course a long time in their blood before making any pronoucement upon it.

Meanwhile, Pearce emerged from his state of foulness towards me and bade me go with him one morning in search of yet more flowers. Not far from the Whittlesea gate we came upon some pale, sweet-scented narcissus, which Pearce instructed me to pick.

"You see," he said, as I gathered the flowers for him, "I am in a most troubling state of unknowing, Robert."

"Are you, John?" I said.

"Yes. For I vowed that in this springtime I would find an answer to a question that has vexed me for many years, namely, what is the scent of flowers? Why is it there? Do plants exhale? Is the scent no more than this exhaled breath? And if there is no exhalation, then in what part of a flower resides the scent?"

"Why do you wish to know this, John?" I enquired.

"
Why
? Because I do
not
know it. There is undoubtedly some Divine lesson hidden in the mystery, but until I have unravelled the mystery itself, I am shut out from knowing what it might be."