"Not merely upon it, Merivel!" he declares. "But entirely around it. He has taken the ancient thing out!"

"Then you owe me money, Pinworth!"

He giggles. He informs me he has no money whatsoever, but lives entirely off the favours his beauty can command. "Do not underestimate beauty," he declares. "It is the hardest currency to be had." He is lying about the twenty shillings and sixpence but, before I can upbraid him, he fixes me with his languid brown eyes and says: "I hear your wife is very beautiful."

I look quickly at Violet, to see if the word "wife" (the mention of which causes her such a deal of anger) has reached her ears, but she is not at her place. She has risen and is attempting to restrain Bathurst 's stallion, the eyes of which are wild and white and which looks as if it will rear or bolt any minute.

Knowing that it is only the quantity of wine I have drunk which prevents me from feeling apprehensive about a sudden death by trampling, I return my attention to Pinworth. "Yes," I say, "Celia is a most pretty woman."

"But," says Pinworth, "I also hear she won't let you lay a finger upon her!"

It is at this moment that Violet succeeds in leading the horse out, Bathurst being now so drunk, he is a slack heap upon it, and so, for some new distraction, the guests now cease their clapping and stamping and turn their attention to me and my role as cuckold which, it seems, is known throughout the land and appears to be a subject that is aired as frequently as Lady Winchelsea's nipples.

I am bombarded by questions. Even Lady Winchelsea's elderly neighbour takes his eyes from her long enough to enquire of me: "How does it strike you, being locked out of the bedroom?" I am about to reply that I give the matter no thought whatsoever, but it seems that I'm not allowed to speak, but only to be the butt of jokes and questions. As is my way, I smile good-naturedly When I am told that I would be a good subject for a play, Sir Willingly Deceived, I slap my crimson thigh and guffaw in agreement. "I would be flattered to be portrayed in a play!" I hear myself declare, but in truth, drunk as I am and eager as I was this night to engage in exorbitant revelling, I feel my good humour being suddenly pricked, as if by a brittle shard of ice. And I know only I feel this. Still grinning, I look from one face to another. What I see behind the smiles and what I hear in the laughter is pity.

Later that night, while the servants toil to set to rights the hall, most horribly awash with spilt wine, vomit and flux from the horse, I am half carried to Violet's satin bed. Excited by the success of her party, she is hot and amorous. Her hands explore me. I feel her breasts touch the moths. I look down at her arched back, the strength of which I have often found strangely arousing, but feel most peculiarly numb, as if my whole body had been enfeebled by a kind of paralysis.

"Violet," I whisper, "I have drunk too much, I must sleep."

"No, you must not," says Violet, "not yet." And she falls to work upon me with great zest. After a deal of time, I am hard enough to take somewhat feeble possession of her, but alas, my heart is not in it and I am immediately limp again, thus rousing Violet to terrible anger. "What is the matter with you, Merivel?" she demands to know. "What in the world is wrong with you?"

"I am not myself, Violet," I mumble. "That is evident. But why, pray?"

"The wine…"

"Nonsense, Robert. You and I have been drunk many times."

"It must be the wine…"

But even as Violet goes to work on me once more, I know that it is not only the champagne I have drunk that has made me such a poor lover. Something else has afflicted me. Partly, it is the realisation that I am, at dinners and soirées in London and elsewhere, an object of pity. I believe, however, I could endure this with fortitude and good humour had the thought not entered my mind that, in my relationship with Celia, I now had cause to pity myself. Poor Merivel, goes my little lament, he has married the woman with the most beautiful voice in England and she cannot bear him to come near her! She is in his house and yet, as long as he lives, he will never touch her, never place a kiss upon her hair, even, or feel the touch of her white hand on his flat and ugly face…

"That's somewhat better," I hear Violet say, as she pauses in her whore's antics.

Alas, alas, my heart is saying, how excellent a thing it might be if, in my journeying from bed to bed, from Meg to Violet to Rosie Pierpoint, I could pause at the door of the Rose Room. I knock courteously upon it and the door is opened and she draws me inside, my wife, and I sit and caress her feet while she sings to me and then, not with my normal haste and flurry, but with a calm dignity, I stand up and kiss her mouth and she puts her arms round my neck, and up and down the corridors of the great houses there is no mockery or pity, for at last I am standing where the King stood, loving the woman he loved but to whom he married me…

I make love to Violet. She caterwauls like an Infidel, but I am silent, thinking my new thoughts.

I was not fully recovered from Violet's party for two days, at which time Farthingale reminded me curtly that it was Christmas Eve.

I try, in my life, not to think very frequently about my mother, finding myself distressed not only by my memory of her death but more horribly so by my memory of her hopes for me, by her belief that one day she would be proud of me. But at Christmas, it is difficult to prevent my thoughts from returning to her, and they did so again as the year of 1665 approached.

She would, on the birthday of Christ, allow herself what she called "an extra helping of prayer." At the time of the Civil War, she would pray for peace. Always, she asked God to spare me and my father. But at Christmas, she talked to God as if He were Clerk of the Acts in the Office of Public Works. She prayed for cleaner air in London. She prayed that our chimneys would not fall over in the January winds; she prayed that our neighbour, Mister Simkins, would attend to his cesspit, so that it would cease its overflow into ours. She prayed that Amos Treefeller would not slip and drown "going down the public steps to the river at Blackfriars, which are much neglected and covered in slime, Lord." And she prayed, of course, that plague would not come.

As a child, she allowed me to ask God to grant me things for which my heart longed. I would reply that my heart longed for a pair of skates made of bone or for a kitten from Siam. And we would sit by the fire, the two of us, praying. And then we would eat a lardy cake, which my mother had baked herself, and ever since that time the taste of lardy cake has had about it the taste of prayer.

On Christmas Day, then, kept inside the house by rain falling hour after hour from a black sky, I sat alone in my Withdrawing Room, thinking about my mother and trying to compose a plea to God, assisted by morsels of an excellent lardy cake which I had ordered Cattlebury to bake.

After an hour or more, I found I had consumed the entire cake and still had not been able to formulate my prayer. In truth, I did not know what I was asking for, or rather I knew and yet knew not. In a kind of desperation, I abandoned all idea of talking to God, but knelt down by the fire with my head stuffed into a chair (as if resting upon my mother's lap) and spoke mumblingly to her. "Guide me, my sweet departed mother," I said, "for the idea of reciprocity has entered my mind. It is creating there a yearning no longer to be Merivel, the Fool, but to be…" (here, I had to pause and shovel the last crumbs of the lardy cake into my mouth) "… to be Merivel, the proper man."

It was, as you see, not much of a prayer at all, but it was the best I could manage, at least for the time being. I got up off my knees and was about to go and sing a little to my bird, which, if my eyes are not deceiving me, is becoming somewhat thin and bedraggled in this English winter (further proof that it is of Indian origin and thus pining for the heat of the Ganges delta) when Will Gates entered the room, carrying in his hands a most exquisitely worked leather box.