I have noticed, however, that there is one shortcoming in our modes of treatment, which are based upon the unspoken thesis that lunacy is a liquid thing, which may, drop by drop, or in a sudden heaving torment, be coaxed out of the body in streams of blood, vomit or faeces. I do not know whether or not lunacy is a liquid thing but, were it to be so, I would try natural as well as unnatural means of bringing about the body's excretions. And this we do not do. I would cause the lunatics to weep (either with laughter or with sadness, it would not matter) and I would cause them to sweat. For the first, I would tell stories; for the second, I would play music and let them dance. Yet neither tears nor perspiration are encouraged. With those who do cry we are stern, telling them to cease their wailing and remember Jesus who never wept for himself, only for the sufferings of others. And of course there is no dancing. The only exercise taken by the inmates of our Hospital is the passing of the shuttle through the warp of the loom, the turning of the spinning wheels and the slow shuffling round the Airing Court. And this overlooking of two beneficial evacuations of nature has begun to worry me, so that it keeps bobbing to the surface of my mind. It bobs up, in truth, so frequently and persistently that I may soon be forced to disturb Pearce's reverie with his primroses by revealing to him my thoughts upon the subject.

Word that I was once at Court has reached the inmates of William Harvey. How it has traveled there I do not know, unless the hand of the King may still be felt in the ice of the scalpel blade. As Pearce has stated, most of those in WH have no remembrance of the word "Court", nor could imagine what manner of thing a Court might be. But there is one, calling himself Piebald, a mutineer on the Valiant Queen, who now takes great delight in telling me that all men on earth with a rank above midshipman are bringers of pox and pestilence and suffering, and should be slain – as he single-handedly slew three officers – "to rid this England of the stink of privilege". Because I was once a "Court Prick", he includes me among those he wishes to kill, and each week he devises a new means of death for me, death and violence being all that occupy his mind, day and night.

And at night, alone in my linen cupboard, I can sometimes feel mortally afraid of this Piebald. Yet quite often during the day I find myself lingering in his pen, his ways of death being so ingenious that I find solace in them for my imagination. That I do this is, of course, most strange. Yet I find myself wondering, do many men of a cowardly disposition not secretly long to meet face to face that other who, without fuss or deliberation, will instantly take their lives from them? Is it uncommon to feel glad to have found him?

Piebald, My Redeemer

This evening, after the Meeting, I took up a piece of parchment to my room and wrote in a pretty script these blasphemous words.

On the morning of the twenty-first of April, finding myself once again staying awhile in WH to listen to Piebald, then noticing, on emerging from the place, that Pearce was walking across the Airing Court holding a bunch of kingcups to his nose, I came suddenly to the conclusion that we two might ourselves be going mad and that it would be possible to recognise in our behaviours – mine with Piebald, Pearce's with the flowers – the first footsteps of our madness. And no sooner had I addressed this possibility than I came stumbling upon a truth about the fate of the insane which had hitherto remained hidden not only from me but I believe from all the Keepers at Whittlesea. And it is this:

The man who is merely ill will seek out, at the first sign or "footstep" of that illness, the services of a physician to help him to a cure; the insane man, on the contrary, is not taken into any Bedlam or Hospital until his "disease" of madness is so far advanced that it may be beyond cure. In other words, though illness may be arrested early, madness never is – for the only reason that all men learn and know what the footsteps of illness may be, but who can say in each or any case what the footsteps of lunacy are?

Though it was almost dinnertime and the smell of broth in the kitchen brought on a little pain of hunger, I forced myself to go to my room and lie down upon my narrow bed and look very squarely at my supposed truth, following Fabricius's motto: "Let certainty be tempered with disbelief." And I imagined the great anatomist's gaze upon me.

At dinner, I was very quiet and pensive, so that Eleanor enquired: "Are you quite well today, Robert?" I replied that I was well enough but had discovered much, that morning, with which to occupy my mind. Ambrose looked at me benevolently and asked me to share my thoughts with the six Friends "if it may bring you help". I thanked him and said: "Alas, Ambrose, there is so little of the philosopher in me that it is very often the case that my mind is furiously at work upon some supposed great matter which, as soon as I try to put it into words, has the habit of flying out of the window." Edmund smiled. Daniel rose and ladelled a second helping of broth into our bowls. Pearce, dabbing at his thin lips with a coarse napkin, cast in my direction a look of disdain. (It has become a humiliating fact of my life at Whittlesea that, no matter what my mood is, Pearce behaves to me as if he were a mind reader, always knowing precisely what I am thinking.)

In the afternoon, it was the turn of the women of Margaret Fell to make their monotonous perambulation round the oak tree and I and Hannah were their overseers, walking round and round with them and conversing with them "on subjects that will gladden their hearts, such as the coming of spring and the sowing of the Whittlesea House vegetable plot with new lettuce and scarlet beans."

I fell into step beside Katharine and asked her how she regarded the oak, whether it was a thing of beauty or comfort to her, and she replied that she found it to be "quite full of a green death".

"What is this 'green death?" I said.

"It is in nature," she answered, "sometimes in a part of a thing and sometimes in all."

"Do you see it in people? Do you see it, now, in me?"

"No," she said. "In you I see a waft of death. But it is not green."

"What colour might this waft be, then?"

She stopped and regarded me, thus causing the women behind us to knock into us. I gently took her elbow and led her on. I assumed that, after she had thought about it a while, she would reply to my question, but she did not. Her mind had moved away from the subject and onto the thing which torments her night and day, her desertion by her husband while she was sleeping. She began to recount to me – for the twelfth or thirteenth time – how, if he had been a small man he would not have got away without causing her to wake, but being very tall was able to step over her body with one giant stride. And so she began to imitate him, lifting up her skirts and taking great huge awkward steps, causing some of the women to stop walking and watch her and laugh at her and point, as at a lying mountebank. I let her stride on. She calls this imitation of the man who betrayed her a "Leaving Step". She says every man on earth has his own Leaving Step and I often try to calm her rage by agreeing with her and telling her that the King, being very plagued by fools from whom he wishes to walk away, has perfected his Leaving Step into a walk of unsurpassed elegance. Several times, she has asked me to "show the walk" to her. But to make a poor imitation of the King is something I cannot bring myself to do.

The day was very brilliant and warm and we kept the women walking around the tree for longer than the allotted hour. When Katharine had tired of doing her Leaving Step, she came beside me again and after a while put out her hand and touched my shoulder and told me that the colour of the waft of death she saw in me was white. Had she said scarlet, which is a colour that affects me very much, as you will already have noticed, I would have been perturbed by the revelation.