But white was of no significance to me and so I immediately put the thing from my mind.

I did not know that on the evening of the twenty-first of April I was going to break my silence at the Meetings. Though very fascinated by the "truth" I had stumbled upon about the world's inability to try any cure upon the lunatic until he is -in all but a few cases – incurable, I had not planned to offer any discourse upon the subject until I had pondered what practical measures might be taken to remedy this situation. Still less had I plotted within myself to reveal to the Keepers my all-too-Merivelian ideas about the efficacy of weeping and sweating in the treatment of poisonous humours.

And yet, all these things came out of me. And the manner of their coming out was most memorable and strange.

I was seated at one edge of the little semi-circle we make at Meetings round the parlour fire. Near me, on an oak table, was a wooden bowl into which Pearce had put posies of primroses. There was utter silence in the room except for the crackling and spitting of the fire, and there is something about a Quaker silence which is absolute, as if Eternity were then and there beginning.

And in this quiet, I heard myself breathing in the smell of the flowers and after some minutes a certainty stole upon me that this perfume was slowly, with each breath of it that I took, being drawn up into my brain and there being alchemised into syllables and words. And it was not long before my brain seemed to be so full of words – as crammed with them as was the bowl with the primroses – that it began to hurt, and I put my head in my hands to try to get the hurt away. But it would not go. And so I opened my mouth and I began to speak, starting with the phrase, "It has come to me from the Lord," and in a perfectly logical fashion I set forth my argument, saying that madness may be born of many things but yet for all except those who are lunatic from their births there was a Time Before, a time when there was no madness in them and that this would be followed by a Growing Time or a Sickening Time, when the madness was coming upon them, precisely as all disease has a Growing Time. "And we," I said, "we the Keepers of those who are very far gone into a mad sickness, do we not all recognise that the men and women of William Harvey are much further from any help or cure than those in the other two houses? Likewise, is it not our daily fear to find an inhabitant of George Fox or Margaret Fell descended into an uncontrollable mad state, so that we would be forced to chain him up and put him in a pen in William Harvey? Thus we daily admit that madness is not a static thing but, just as all things in the world are changeful, so is madness and, like them, may change for the better or for the worse. But what we do not ask, dear Friends, is what were the Footsteps of each case of madness, in other words how it came there and when and in what manner it first showed itself, yet I, when I was a physician, was taught by the great medical minds of our age that few cures are likely to succeed unless each stage and symptom of a malady is understood. And this is what the Lord has revealed to me, that we should try with each one of those in our care to look back into past time and ask them to try to remember how it was to be in the Time Before and what thing or calamity came about to put them into the Sickening Time. And in this way we might discover the imprint of the steps to madness, there just under the surface, as the imprints of past ages lie under the surface of the earth…"

As I delivered myself of this long speech, I was not aware of how the others regarded it or me, but only of my need to get it out so that my brain would be free of it and no longer hurting in the press of words. I deliberately paused at this point and took in several great breaths and once more the scent of the primroses ascended to my brain and recommenced its alchemy and so I talked on, now making proposals, all of which, I said, had "come to me from Jesus Christ", for the questioning of all inmates of Whittlesea by the Keepers so that the Time Before might become visible to us. And I was entirely held now by my words, as if my words had become a liquid and I immersed in them, like a drowning man in a rushing river. So into the stream now poured all my outlandish things, my fantastical things, my cures by weeping and my cures by dancing, my suggestions for story-telling and the playing of music. As I spoke on these matters, I began to feel a merciful diminution of the pain in my head and so I lifted it up and talked on, staring at the fire, and in the flames of the fire I could see a most wondrous picture of Daniel, attired in the clothes of summer, playing a fiddle, and all the women of Margaret Fell skipping and dancing round him, seeming happy like children. And then the pain left me entirely and the picture vanished and I was silent.

I was very boiling hot. I took off my wig and wiped my face and my head with my handkerchief. I felt the eyes of the others upon me, but no one spoke. A full ten or fifteen minutes passed and the time allowed for the Meeting came to an end and Ambrose put his hands into his prayer steeple and mumbled: "Thank you, dear Lord, that in our presence Robert was moved to speak." And this is all that was said.

Mercifully, it was not my turn that night to take part in a Night Keeping, for as soon as we rose from our circle by the fire, I felt a shivering in my knees and a pain of exhaustion in my belly and I went to my bed and slept a deep, thick sleep from which I did not stir till morning.

When I woke, however, I felt in me a lightness of heart, such I has not experienced since my casting out from Bidnold. I could not account for it, but was most grateful to find it there. (I have, since I arrived here, found myself pondering the thing we call happiness, for which, the King once told me I had a gift. I now recognise that my supposed "gift" was much less of a thing than, say, Hannah's and Eleanor's, they being two of the most contented women I have ever met.)

It was my task, that morning, to work in the vegetable garden with Pearce, together with some six or seven men from George Fox. (I report in passing that Pearce is so fond of this plot, so proud of its drainage ditches and of the infant pear trees he is trying to grow en espalier on its southerly wall, that he likes to oversee all work done there and becomes very vaporous with irritation if his seedlings are not planted in absolutely straight lines.) The sun was once again shining and I would have found my duty in the garden quite pleasant had it not been for Pearce's behaviour towards me that morning, which was most irksome. He acted as one who wished to have nothing to do with me whatsoever, separating himself from any task in which I was occupied and replying most curtly to all my attempts to speak to him. Watching him from a distance planting beans, swooping down on a freshly raked patch of soil like a long-necked bird, using his long white fingers as a dibbling-stick, burying each bean most lovingly and moving on, I remembered how on our angling expeditions near Cambridge this mood of dislike for me would sometimes come over him. Then and now, I find it most hurtful and difficult to endure, particularly as I can seldom fathom what it is I have done to offend him. On this morning, however, I could only conclude that my outpouring of the previous evening had not been to his liking. Some hours – or even days – would probably pass; then Pearce would dissect my thesis with his clever pecking mind and lay it in ruins before me.

Meanwhile, as I plucked weeds from the onion bed, I began in a low voice, lest Pearce hear what I was doing, to talk to the man called Jacob Lowe who was working alongside me and to enquire of him what thing he most clearly remembered before coming to Whittlesea and whether, in his past life, he had some trade or calling. He told me he was a butcher and slaughterer. He described to me the ease with which he could split a calf's head and take out the tender brains. "But I was killed by a whore," he whispered. "I died of her foul cunt. And this is my second life on earth."