I am crying again. Tears are coursing down my face and onto the toad on the tray, over which, finding myself now tired to my very marrow, my body has slumped.

I see the King's hands put down his instruments. He picks up a cloth and wipes blood and viscera off his fingers. And then I lose him. I do not know what happened except that I hear myself talking on and on, to the King I believe, who is no longer near me but in the shadowy laboratory somewhere, moving up and down as he always does, restless and tall and never still… but he is not there. I am alone in the place. He has gone out into the sunlight and I am lying down in the dark, under the oak work bench. I am getting into my grave.

I am woken by an elderly man, wearing the garb of an apothecary. I am parched. The old man understands this and gives me cool, sweet-tasting water in a beaker.

Food is brought to me. I am seated at a little table. I eat some bread. A liveried servant hands me a letter.

I am in the Physic Garden. The sky above me is bright. I break the seal of my letter.

Poor Merivel, (says the letter) I did not warn you, the King's Drops alchemise secrets into words. And yet you have told me nothing. For every thing you revealed, I saw in your face. Beware, however, that love does not turn into need. And so Godspeed with your mission to Celia. I would have her think upon our displeasure for the duration of two months, after which time, she may, if in humble spirit, return to Kew, where we shall come to her.

Signed, Charles Rex

I look over to the sundial. What I wish to say to the King is, "Let me make my entrance again. Let me arrive again, knowing what I know about the Drops." But of course he is no longer there.

Chapter Seven. Water

I did not linger at Whitehall.

Though greeted warmly by a posse of gallants in whose chambers I once played at cards, forfeits and music-making, I found I was in no mood for their company. My head ached intolerably and the thoughts fashioned by my brain seemed to have the quality of dreams. I had a terrible longing to lie down, not necessarily to sleep, but simply to rest my brain. Fain would I have gone to that first chamber of mine, where I had performed my cure-of-neglect upon Lou-Lou, and put on a clean nightcap and lain upon the soft pillows and listened to the great orchestra of the river.

Dinnertime found me at the Leg Tavern where I drank a good quantity of ale to slake the thirst that still burned in my stomach, and then slept an hour on one of its hard settles. I was hungry when I woke and was served a most peculiar meal, a turnover of starlings and a pigs trotter pickled in olives. "Starlings," said the pretty wench who served me, "having blackish flesh and strong-tasting, cure all men of mopish humours," and it is true that, when I had eaten, I felt my thoughts to be more sensible. Either the starlings had worked some humoural change upon me, or merely the potent effect of the King's Drops was now at last abating.

When I emerged from the Leg, I found the street burnished with most beautiful winter sunlight. I am very susceptible to weather. In a Norfolk wind, I sometimes feel my sanity flying away. My good spirits replenished, then, by the starling turnover and the afternoon sun, I decided to make my way to the house of Rosie Pierpoint. To supplement Pierpoint's meagre wage as a bargeman, Rosie had set herself up, in 1661, as a laundress, and it was among her crimping irons and her vats of starch and her great coal-burning stove that I hoped to find her. If I could not persuade her to let me touch her Thing, I would content myself with watching the sunset from her window while she washed my shirt and removed the quail stains from my coat pocket.

She was at home and hard at work. So great was the heat in the workroom, she was stripped down to her bodice and her soft arms were moist and pink – a pink so very pretty that I would dearly love to arrive at the precise colour on my palette. Even as I approached Rosie and she rested her flat iron on the stove top and we embraced each other with a good deal of joy, I remembered seeing, in some great painting, a cherub the colour of Rosie's arms and fell to wondering how, in his winged existence, the little fellow had got so hot.

What followed was most sweet and delectable, reminding me that there is scarcely any more agreeable thing on earth than the meeting of parted lovers. To the ease of mind engendered by this Act of Forgetting is added the balm of pleasant memory. As the brain banishes its ever-present consciousness of death, so the body finds itself enraptured by rediscovery. It is not, I think, fanciful to say that such meetings are both Acts of Oblivion and Acts of Remembrance.

I stayed with Rosie until the sun went down. We lay on a rumpled pile of soiled sheets, shirts, petticoats, lace collars and table cloths and on this dirty linen made a very fine feast of each other, a feast of which, if I live to be an old man, I may well, in my clean and lonely bed, find myself dreaming.

We got up at last and Rosie lit two rushlights and by the light of these would work on at her ironing table till Pierpoint came home and they had their supper of whelks and oysters and bread and ale.

And I made my way to Hydes Wharf at Southwark where I hired a tilt-boat and asked the tilt-man, who had a foxy and mischievous face, to paddle me to Kew.

" Kew is a fairish way," this tilt-man said, "and it will be black pitch night 'fore we get to there, Sir."

"I know," I replied, "but my day and the best part of last night both put me into a lather of heat and I have a great mind to feel the cool of the river."

"How shall we keep the channel, Sir, in the dark, and not stray onto shallows or be splintered to pieces by a lighter or a barge?"

"There is a three-quarter moon," I pointed out, "and no cloud. We shall see our way tolerably well."

"We shall be as cold as corpses by the time we get there!"

It was plain to me by now that Fox (as I christened the tilt-man) had no desire to take me on this journey, but, remembering that in this new age most things can be had by bribery, I offered to double his fare from two shillings to four. I settled myself comfortably under the little canopy, and we embarked on the evening tide.

Why did I wish to go to Kew? Now that the effects of the Drops had worn off entirely and I was once again capable of rational thought, I knew that I must give some attention to what the King had told me concerning Celia. For reasons which I could not completely comprehend, I felt exceedingly uncomfortable with the message I was instructed to convey. Something within me wished, for the first time in my life, to disobey the King. Why? I really did not know. Far from purging me of all hope, the event of the morning had proved to me that the King's affection for me still endured. What he had said of Celia, however, his hand gesturing with the pestle, seemed designed to convey to me that, beyond mere lust, he had no feelings for my wife at all, and that his restless spirit would very soon tire of her. In going to Kew, then, in hoping to see (all shuttered and dark as I knew it would be) the house he had given her, I believe I had it in mind to try to measure his love for her and, according to how the scales tilted, decide upon the message I would take home to Bidnold. The notion that one is able to guage the quality of one person's love for another by a moonlit glimpse of a house got from a tilt-boat is, I freely admit, preposterous. And yet there is no other explanation for the journey my heart was suddenly so determined upon. Did the King love Celia, or did he not? In the company of Fox and with a light breeze ruffling my jabot and cooling my overheated face, I believed myself to be gliding towards my answer.