Restoration (49 page)

It is the middle of the afternoon. I tell Will that I will rest for a little while. So he leaves me and closes the door. I do not sleep, or even shut my eyes, but lie and listen to the wind and marvel at where I am.

Though I feel somewhat solitary and foolish, Will and Cattlebury insist that supper is served in the Dining Room.

I have put on my blue and cream suit. I am not placed at the head of the table, where I used to sit, but at my right hand, as it were, as if I were my own favoured guest.

The room is lit by numberless candles.

"Blow some of them out, Will," I say. "I do not need a hundred pieces of light to eat a carbonado." But he refuses. "You were fond of light, Sir Robert," he says. "You used to tell me that."

The meal that Cattlebury has prepared for me is very rich and I disappoint him and Will by being unable to eat more than a few mouthfuls of it. I see these two men look at me and think, He is not like his former self, and it touches me to know that the old Merivel – so despised by Pearce and by Celia and causing such irritation to the King – was to them a person of substance.

The Burgundy wine I am offered smells of summer fruit, yet has so strong an effect upon my blood that when my meal is ended, I can hardly rise from the table, so heavy do my limbs feel.

"Lord," I say to Will, who helps me up, "it is as if old age had come upon me in the space of half an hour."

"You are tired, Sir, after your journey, that's all."

"Either that, Will," I reply, "or I'm dying."

"Well, Sir Robert, you cannot die in the Dining Room. It would be most horrid. So let us get you to your bed."

I tell Will that what I wish to do is to go out into the park, above which the clouds have sped away and uncovered a round white moon, and walk all round the house and take some breaths of the spring night. He looks at me and shakes his head, as if he believes the air will pierce my lungs like a knife, but I stumble out into the hall towards the door pulling him with me. "Come on, Will," I say, "for this is all I have, this one night."

I see the door open and then I stare out and I see a cold light falling across the lawn and I smell the earth. And then I do not remember anything more at all.

I wake under the green canopy. In the scarlet tassels hangs a sweet memory of Pearce.

The room is warm. I am wearing my nightshirt and my nightcap. I do not know what time it is, or what day, but seem to understand that I have slept for a long while.

I touch my face and find it very rough with stubble. I am a sight, I think, a terrible sight lately…

I draw back the bed curtains. On a little oak table is a china plate with a lardy cake upon it, and this discovery of the cake wakes in me a colossal hunger, as if I had not eaten for an entire week. So I cut myself a slice and cram it into my mouth with disgusting haste. Then I eat a second piece, dropping crumbs down my chin and onto my lap.

What I decide next is that the day upon which I have woken, whatever day it may be, is full of sunshine. I cannot see it yet, because this Olive Room faces north, but I know that, if I go to the front of the house, I will find it: a dazzling light.

So I leave the room, just as I am in my nightshirt with cake crumbs at the corner of my mouth, and go out onto the landing and, as I predicted, I see the sunlight falling upon the stairs. I stand and look down. And there, after a moment or two of blinking and rubbing my eyes and taking off my nightcap, I begin to see and hear a most peculiar commotion: the hall is full of dogs. There are seven or eight of them – little Spaniels like my poor Minette – and they are running in excited circles and yapping.

I try very hard to decide whether the dogs are truly there or not there at all except in my dilapidated mind, but I am quite unable to judge. I must go down, I tell myself, and try to touch one of them and, if it does not disappear or turn into a yellow scarf like the clump of primroses, then I will know that it is a living thing and not any hallucination.

I am barefoot, but the wood of the stairs, burnished by the sun, feels warm. And then I notice, as I go down, that the front door is open and I can see shadows on the gravel, as of people moving about, and somewhere in my brain, that has been so crammed with sleep, I know what this must signify and yet the meaning of it refuses to come to me except very slowly… so slowly… like an old memory that lies rusted and neglected and half hidden… and then I have reached the hall to call one of the dogs to me, but they all come, they all flock around me and jump up onto my legs and to my outstretched hand and wag their tails. I am surrounded by them. They are certainly real, Merivel, I inform myself, for two of them are biting the hem of your nightshirt and already you can hear it tearing. But I do not try to push the dogs away. I like their excitement. I think how sweet and pretty they are. So I start to play with them, dangling my nightcap towards them so that they jump high to try to bite it, then snatching it away and, as their yapping and frenzy increases with my teasing of them, I hear myself begin to laugh like a child.

And then a very long shadow falls across the golden floor and across me and across my laughter. At the same moment, one of the dogs starts to unwind the entire hem of my nightshirt. And then I look up. And I see the King.

Affecting not to notice that I was without my wig and unshaven and barefoot and wearing a torn nightshirt covered in cake crumbs, the King invited me, in a soft and gentle voice, to take a turn with him in the park.

While a cluster of liveried grooms and footmen – directed by Will, also strangely garbed in livery – unloaded a great many trunks and boxes from two magnificent coaches, we walked down the drive for a little way, then turned left into the grass towards a line of deer grazing in some shade. The dogs ran ahead of us, chasing each other and barking.

We had gone this far in silence. Then the King suddenly stopped and turned and looked back at the house.

"It is mine now," he said.

I looked at it. Bidnold Manor in the County of Norfolk…

"What, Sire?" I said.

"You heard me, Merivel. Now it belongs to me."

"To you…?"

"Yes."

"And the sale to the Vi -?"

"It was never paid for. Money was promised. Money I wished to use to fit out a ship. But it was never given. So Bidnold is to
be
a ship now."

"Be a ship?"

"Yes. Do you understand?"

"Not entirely…"

"It is to be
my
ship: in other words, the place in which, from time to time, I can sail away from care. Now you see it,
n'est-ce pas
? You, of all people, now you comprehend it, don't you Merivel? It is the place where I shall come to dream."

I nodded. The King watched me. I wanted to tell him that he could have chosen no better place, but under his gaze it was difficult to bring out the words.

"You need not comment," he said after a moment, "for I know everything you feel. But look at this. Do you remember to whom you gave it?"

"Look at what, Sir?"

"At this."

The King held out his hand (encased in an emerald coloured glove) and I saw in his palm a small piece of card, very soiled and curled and thinned by time. I took it up and peered at it and, after looking at it blankly for a second or two, recognised my name upon it,
R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon.
and my old address in Cheapside.

I looked up. Across the features of the King now spread the smile, the effect of which upon my heart it is impossible to describe.

"Yes," he said, "your card. Shown to me not long after the fire by one of my hatmakers, Arthur Goffe. He told me that it was you who had saved his wife."

"Well, I and another man, much larger and stronger than me. But I did not know this was one of your people."

"No. Of course you did not. And even if you had known, it would not have been me who drove you to bravery. It was others, was it not? A certain glovemaker and his dear wife?"

"Yes."

"How fortunate, Merivel. For it is one of my beliefs that we cannot truly live until the debts we owe our parents have been paid. For they and their deaths can never be forgotten. Is that not so?"

"Yes."

"Even in an age in which we wisely practice the excellent art of oblivion, certain things remain."

"Yes."

"And another thing, if I am not mistaken, is your love for this place."

"Yes. I love it. From the day when I first saw it – "

"So I knew you would come back here. Gates and I were entirely agreed. We knew that one day you would come and that this is how I would find you."

"You knew?"

"Naturally. But I remember also that there was always one room that entranced you, a round room in the West Tower, and yet I heard that you had never found any use for it."

"No. I think that when I lived here what I used to believe was that this room was… beyond me… too high, or some such thing… as if I could not understand what I should put in it… as if, almost, it was a part of my mind that I could not see."

"Why do you not, then, go and look at it now?"

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Well, Sir, I will, if you wish, yet I would prefer to continue our walk."

The King gave a hoot of laughter, which disturbed the deer and sent them bounding away.

"'Continue our walk'! "Continue our walk'! Look at me, Merivel."

I tried to look up into the King's face, but the sun was in my eyes, so I shaded them with my hand.

"Go back to the house," instructed the King, "and go up the stairs and into this empty room. And see whether you can make sense of it now."

"Very well, Sir."

"Then we may continue our walk if you wish."

"As you will, Sire."

"Off you go, then."

I paused and stared up at the West Tower. It was many, many months since my thoughts had returned to this room, which had never, in truth, been a proper room at all, but only a vacant space. Now I noticed that on the three window ledges were clustered some white birds.

"Fantails," said the King. "Very pretty, I think. It might be that, from time to time, you may decide to open a window and let them in."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"Into your room."

"Let the birds into the room?"

"Into
your
room."

"My room?"

"Yes. I am giving you the room. It is yours. Until my reign is over and another age comes. Until then it is restored to you – in return for the life you saved and in return for the man you have become. It is your room and you can come and go from it as you please, and I will never take it from you."

Do you see me now?

I am in the room.

I am standing in the white room in my torn white nightshirt.

Merivel. Just as he was. Do you see him? He has no wig on his head. His hogs' bristles itch. He puts a hand to his cheek and discovers a cake crumb.

But I am not thinking of him. What has returned to my mind, in this high white space, is Margaret. I hold her in my arms and take off her bonnet and put a soft kiss on her fiery curls and she squeaks and kicks and blows bubbles into my face and then reaches out a fat little hand and takes hold of my nose.

I laugh and remove her hand and carry her to one of the windows, where we can hear the pigeons murmuring. I hold her up and show her the great expanse of the park that I once saw as wild, undisciplined lines of yellow and green, and dark splodges of brown and purple, and above it the sun which, in the absence of any device by which to measure time, tells me that it is mid-day on the fairest April morning of my life.

I do not know how long I remain in the room. Perhaps, when you glimpse me for the last time, the dusk is already falling. I wrap Margaret more tightly in her shawl, for it is getting cold now, and together we move towards the door.

"Tomorrow," I tell her, "I must go on to Whittlesea. But one day soon – before you have learned to walk, before I have grown too frail to climb the stairs – I shall bring you back."