Impossible to say I wasn't happy. My half-finished knowledge of medicine was adequate to keep the dogs well, particularly dogs fed on milk and beef and bedded in warm rooms. And as to comfort, diversion and women, I had all any man could ask. I was growing fat and a trifle indolent, but then so were many at Court, not possessed of King Charles's great energy and curiosity. When Pearce visited me, he grew white and rigid at the sight of so much profane luxury. "This age suffers from a woeful moral blindness," he said stonily.

And then…

On an April morning, the King sent for me.

"Merivel," he said, "I want you to get married."

"Married, Sir?"

"Yes."

"Marriage, Sire, is not, has never been, on my mind…"

"I know. I'm not asking you to want it. I'm asking you to do it, as a favour to me."

"But-"

"Have I not done very many favours to you, Merivel?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Voilà! You owe me at least this one. And there will be compensations. I propose to give you the Garter, so that your bride will have a title, albeit a modest one. And small but agreeable estates in Norfolk I have confiscated from a recalcitrant Anti-Monarchist. So arise, Sir Robert, and go to your duty without hesitation or barter."

I knelt. We were in the Royal Bedchamber and from the adjoining study came the disunified tick-tocking and pinging of the clocks, which perfectly mirrored, at that moment, my own confused thoughts.

"Well?" said the King.

I looked up. The Royal visage was smiling at me benignly. The Royal fingers caressed the dark brown moustache.

"Who…?" I stammered.

The King leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. "Ah yes. The bride. It is, of course, Celia Clemence."

The knee on which my weight was balanced trembled and then tottered beneath me. I fell sideways into the carpet. I heard the King chuckle.

"It means, of course, that you – and possibly she – will have to spend some time in Norfolk, thus depriving me of your respective companies now and then. But this is a sacrifice I am prepared to make."

I endeavoured to right myself, but my left knee had gone suddenly numb and wouldn't support me, so I had no alternative but to lie in a kind of foetal heap by the Royal footstool.

"I don't," said the King, "need to explain myself further, do I, Merivel?"

"Well, Sir…"

"I do? I'm surprised at you. I thought you were one of the most knowledgeable people at Court."

"No, it is merely that this is… this matter is… somewhat difficult for me to grasp."

"I can't for the life of me see why. It is childishly simple, Merivel. The frequent presence of Celia Clemence in my bed has become a necessity in my life. I am, as everyone knows, utterly beguiled by her. Likewise, my grand amour, Barbara Castlemaine, is absolutely essential to my continuing health and well-being. In short, I love and need both mistresses, but I have no wish to continue to endure Lady Castlemaine's tantrums on the subject of Miss Clemence. They make me edgy and give me indigestion. So she must be married at once – the better that I may come by her again secretly, without Castlemaine's knowledge. But to whom must I marry her? Not, I think, to a powerful aristocrat, who will soon irritate me profoundly by starting to consider his own position and honour. No. What I am looking for in Celia's husband is a man who will enjoy and profit from his estates and title, and who will be kindly and amusing company to his bride on the rare occasions he is with her, but who is far too enamoured of women in general to make the mistake of loving any particular one. And in you, Merivel, I have surely made the perfect choice. Have I not? You also, as I am fond of observing, have a pleasingly fashionable name. To ask Celia to become – in name alone, of course – Lady Merivel, is something I feel I can undertake with equanimity."

So that was it, uttered: the fifth beginning.

The dogs were to be taken from my care and in their place was to be put the youngest of the King's mistresses. The practical matter which most absorbed me, as I left the King's presence, was that I could not remember how far from and in what relation to (viz. north-east or directly north of) London lay the county of Norfolk.

Chapter Two. Wedding Games

On her wedding eve, my future bride was to be locked, as custom dictates, with her bridesmaids inside her father's house. In the morning, I would ride to her door (from the rather lowly inn I would be forced to occupy on the night the sixth of June), with all the village running and shrieking before me, got up in homespun garters, love-knots, ribbons and general fooleries, playing flutes and viols and banging tambourines. I was looking forward to these proceedings. You do not need reminding that I am a glutton for foolishness, and this rowdy pageant was, in prospect, greatly to my taste.

I was also looking forward to putting on my wedding clothes, chosen by the King and made by his personal tailor: an admirable white silk shirt, a sash of purple, breeches striped white and gold, white stockings, purple shoes, gold-buckled, a black brocaded coat and a purple and black hat with white plumes of such magnificence that, from a distance, I appeared to be wearing a three-masted barque upon my head.

I had, of course, invited Pearce to the wedding, but he had declined my invitation, much to my chagrin. I would have liked Pearce to see me in my garb. I can only conclude that he refused, not from envy or mean-mindedness, but that he feared the sight of me might cause his circulation to cease, thus cruelly sundering him from his mentor, the late William Harvey, the first man to understand that blood moved in a circular motion, outwards from the heart and to it again via the pulmonary veins. "Not a day passes," Pearce once said to me, "when I do not feel WH within me." (Pearce is much given to metaphysical utterances of this kind, but my affection for him makes me charitable towards them.)

To my bride's father, Sir Joshua Clemence, I had had to go, in mid-April, to beg his daughter's hand. The King, it seems, went before, to vouch for me as a man of honour, talent and wealth, owner of the country estate of Bidnold in Norfolk and desirous only of making his daughter contented and comfortable in all things, for as long as I should live.

So it was that Sir Joshua Clemence received me with great affability, pouring sack for me, averting his eye only fractionally when I spilt a little of it on the watersilk arm of my chair, and assuring me that the King's word was all he needed to deliver his pretty daughter into my hands. What I do not know is whether, at the time of the wedding, Sir Joshua already knew that Celia was the King's mistress. I suspect that he did and was flattered by the knowledge. For the King moves like God in our world, like Faith itself. He is a fount of beauty and power, of which we all yearn, in our overheated hearts, to feel some cooling touch. Sir Joshua struck me as an intelligent and in all respects noble person, yet even he, when he heard that the King was to be a guest at the wedding, couldn't conceal the hectic spots of joy that broke out on his cheeks. He told me that his greatest love was music, in particular the playing of the viola da gamba. "Now," he said rapturously, "I will play at my daughter's wedding and at the same time achieve my life-long dream, that the King, restored to his throne, would one day listen to my music."

With Celia, I had, prior to the wedding, half a dozen meetings, all presided over by the King, with whom my bride (as was generally gossiped round London) appeared so deeply in love that her hazel eyes hardly ever strayed from his face. I had a sense, at these meetings, of my own superfluity, but was too enthralled by the maps of Norfolk the King produced, on which to show me Bidnold Manor and its lands, to let this feeling discomfort me.