We are drinking a good claret. The pains of exhaustion fade somewhat. I am conversing with Herr Hummel on the subject of madrigal harmonies (about which I know very little but he a great deal, thus sparing me the effort of talking) when I suddenly remember my dream of the King on my roof and how, when asked how I was ever to master the art of oboe playing, he had advised me to "learn in secret". I interrupt Musikmeister Hummel to propose a toast to the King. We raise our glasses and I drink with great relish, aware that, though the arrival of Finn is most irritating to me, the arrival of Herr Hummel may prove most fortunate. For around his temporary habitation in my house I am now constructing a plan.

I glance at Celia. Warmed by the wine, she is smiling, but not at me, of course. I lower my gaze and for a few brief seconds allow myself to watch the rise and fall of her breasts.

Chapter Eleven. The Unknown Known

My birthday is approaching. I was born under the constellation of Aquarius, the eleventh sign of the Zodiac, the sign of the water-butler, that humble but indispensable slave who fetches from wells and rivers the element so vital to the structure of human tissue. I imagine this Aquarius as an old, stooped man, his spine warped by the weight of a wooden yoke from which hang a pair of brimming pails. On he staggers, day after day, year after year, with his precious burden, but his strength is waning, he totters and stumbles and, as he moves through time, more and more water is spilled, thereby engendering in the bellies of the ancient gods an irritation stronger even than thirst. They long to give the slave's skinny buttocks a vengeful kick. They would, if they dared, send a rod of lightning to pierce his ragged neck. And yet they must not. Hopeless as he is, they cannot do without him.

Despite my birth date, the twenty-seventh of January, I have never, I think, held any notion of my own indispensability. As a child my mother looked at me lovingly and would no doubt have wept a while had I been eaten by a badger in the woods of Vauxhall. But this is all. She would not have died without my hand to hold. As a student of medicine, I prayed that my knowledge and skills might one day lie between a man and his death, but I cannot recall now that they ever did. In my brief delirious sojourn at Whitehall, I verily believed I was becoming indispensable to the King, but time has shown me that here I deceived myself utterly. More recently I have longed for Celia to esteem and value me and hold my life to be of prime importance, but much of the time she behaves towards me as if I was not there. Since the arrival of Finn with his commission for the portrait, she no longer regards me as her overseer. With her picture done, the King will, as she suspects, call her back and that will be the end of it. The duet of my imaginings will never be played. And yet I go on trying to please her. Her voice still moves me more than I can express. When seated near her, before the fire in the Withdrawing Room or at the supper table, I long to reach out and touch her. When she returns to Kew, I know that I shall mourn her loss. I may even write foolish letters to her, saying what I do not dare to say to her face. For I am a paradoxical thing: a dispensable Aquarius. I lie foolishly sprawled in the gutter of the via della vita. My pails, brimming not with water but with my own appetites and vain pleas, have toppled me; I have not been kicked.

I am to become thirty-eight years old. I shall note the arrival, duration and waning of this day in the following manner. I shall sleep late, hoping to dream of tennis (a sport which used to make me strangely happy). I shall pass some hours of the morning with Musikmeister Hummel, pursuing my secret plan, the unfortunate venue of which appears to be the summer-house. In the afternoon, I shall paint Russians. In the evening I shall devise some merriment, pay some musicians, invite Mister James de Gourlay ("Monsieur Dégeulasse", with whom, in that society mocks him for his pretensions, I now feel some kindred affection) and his wife and daughters to supper and to dancing. I will give Celia a good quantity of champagne in the hope that it will make her kind.

As the day approaches, the weather has turned very pretty, the fine frost of the mornings cut like diamonds by an unclouded sun. It is most pleasant to walk in my park with the Musikmeister and hear him agree to collude with my plan, which is that during the time when Celia is sitting for the portrait we shall retire together to some place where we shall not be overheard (I suggested the cellars, but Hummel is mortally afraid to set eyes on a rat there, so we have agreed upon the summer-house) and he will teach me, in secret, to master my instrument. I have impressed upon him that there is not much time, that before this spring comes I expect my wife to have returned to London. "But it is my dearest wish," I told him, "before I lose her and do not set eyes upon her again for months, or even years, to play for one of her songs – and just the one will satisfy me – a perfect accompaniment. If you will help me to do that, Herr Hummel, you will have my lasting gratitude."

The Musikmeister looked me up and down, as if expecting to find somewhere on my unpromising person some infinitesimal piece of evidence of musicality. Finding none, he had the courtesy to smile (where the uncouth Finn would have sneered) and promised me that he would do all he could. I see now that my first opinion of him was accurate: he is an honest and agreeable man, as indeed one might expect any friend of Sir Joshua's to be. And so I fall to pondering the truth of my own words to Celia. Does music teach wisdom? Does it civilise the soul? If all the men and women of England were plucking at strings and lisping into reeds would the mind of the nation be quieter and more comfortable with itself?

This, then, is the night of the day of the twenty-seventh of January 1665, my thirty-eighth birthday, and I will tell you of certain disturbing things that came to pass upon it. (I note for you in parentheses how agreeable I find the phrase "came to pass" which I do not believe existed in the body of the language until King James's mighty scholars sat down and alchemised it from ancient sacred tongues and put it there.)

The day did not begin as I had imagined. I did not lie under my turquoise canopy dreaming sportive dreams till mid-morning, but rose early to find myself wondering whether I could hope for any gifts. I am childishly excited by presents, however insignificant they may be and always feel most grateful to the giver. The notion that I might pass the day without receiving one gift whatsoever depressed me not a little. At such moments of despondency, I long not merely to see the King, but to be the King, surrounded as he is by people pressing one upon another to lay offerings at his feet.

Knowing such thoughts to be most silly, I rose and washed my eyes and face, put on a brocaded gown and descended to my kitchen, where it amuses me sometimes to concoct for myself the kind of unskilled meal that I once made upon my fire in my rooms at Ludgate. My breakfast, then, consisted of a dish of eggs coddled with cream, upon which I laid some salted anchovies – a rather excellent invention, which I ate by the kitchen range.

Will Gates found me there and informed me that a carter had arrived from London, bringing "a quantity of furs", these of course being the tabards made of badger pelts by old Trench. There were ten of them, each very adroitly sewn, with a badger's snout rearing up on either shoulder and a row of tails forming a black fringe around the hem. Having examined them (Trench, as instructed, had used a good woollen cloth for the linings), I persuaded Will to put his on. He protested at first, saying that he would not feel nimble nor ready for work in such a garment. "Will," I said, "do not be pettish. They have been designed to leave the limbs free and agile." Alas, Will did look somewhat awkward and hampered by his tabard. He is a very short, thin man and the garment appeared both too wide for him and too long, so that the badger tails trailed upon the floor and the badger snouts hung off his shoulders somewhat dejectedly. I could not suppress a little attack of mirth.