I requested him to describe his "death" to me. And he told me that his testicles had swollen and burst "being full of the pox" and out through these burst cods had poured his life.
I looked up at Jacob Lowe. His face was ruddy, his musculature good, his nose prominent and not one whit decayed. From these external signs, I felt it possible to conclude that, if he had once suffered from the pox, he was now cured of it. Such cures are rare but where they occur they have depended – in all cases I have witnessed – on the giving of mecurius sublimate, of which the chief element is mercury itself, that capricious metal to which I once likened the King. And mercury is, if the dose is not most carefully measured, a poison. I saw a man at St Thomas 's die of mercury poisoning and he died screaming and raving, as if a madness had suddenly come upon him. I smiled to myself and looked over to Pearce's stooping back. In the time it had taken me and Jacob Lowe to weed the onion patch, I had retraced the primary footsteps to this one man's lunacy.
Neither at dinnertime nor during the afternoon did any of the friends make reference to my speech of the evening before and Pearce's lack of charity towards me seemed to confirm that he at least had been most displeased by it. I thus kept quiet to myself my conversation with Jacob Lowe and waited for the Meeting to see if Ambrose might pass judgement upon my theory. But he did not mention it, and I confess I felt somewhat cast down to think that what had appeared to me as a revelation appeared to the Keepers of Whittlesea as a thing of no consequence at all. It was only some days later that I was to discover that their way with knowledge is a quiet way. They do not snatch at it or gobble it down; they take it into themselves slowly like a physic and let it course a long time in their blood before making any pronoucement upon it.
Meanwhile, Pearce emerged from his state of foulness towards me and bade me go with him one morning in search of yet more flowers. Not far from the Whittlesea gate we came upon some pale, sweet-scented narcissus, which Pearce instructed me to pick.
"You see," he said, as I gathered the flowers for him, "I am in a most troubling state of unknowing, Robert."
"Are you, John?" I said.
"Yes. For I vowed that in this springtime I would find an answer to a question that has vexed me for many years, namely, what is the scent of flowers? Why is it there? Do plants exhale? Is the scent no more than this exhaled breath? And if there is no exhalation, then in what part of a flower resides the scent?"
"Why do you wish to know this, John?" I enquired.
"Why? Because I do not know it. There is undoubtedly some Divine lesson hidden in the mystery, but until I have unravelled the mystery itself, I am shut out from knowing what it might be."
I held out my bunch of narcissus to Pearce and he took it delicately from me, like a girl. I was tempted to say that the smell of the primroses had led me to knowledge I believed more useful than any he might derive from the study of flowers, but I did not.
Chapter Seventeen. Visitors to Bethlehem
Last night I had a dream of Will Gates. I was in London, and walking to the Tower, and I came upon Will, in rags, begging at the Tower gate. I put some beans into his begging bowl and pretended I did not know him.
When I woke, very dismayed by this dream, I turned my attention to the struggle my mind was undergoing with regard to the word "oblivion". I do not need to remind you of all that I was endeavouring to forget when I was at Bidnold. Now, much of what I had consigned to darkness I am obliged to bring once more into the light. At the same time, back into oblivion must go my turquoise bed, my candlelit suppers, the Red Deer of my park, Celia's apricot ribbons, and of course the smell of the King's perfume which, according to Pearce, I only loved because it was the smell of power. Alas, all these things seem to have been carved into the very tissue of my mind, like graven images. Though many hours may pass during which I do not think of them, I do not believe I will ever succeed in forgetting them completely.
My bird, also, my Indian Nightingale, is very frequently in my thoughts. I know now that I was duped. The creature was a mere blackbird. But the strange thing is that I do not mind. For while it was alive, it gave me pleasure and the realisation that I was deluded only makes me smile. It is a fact about Merivel – and about many in this age – that they do not always wish to know the truth about a thing. And when the truth is at last revealed to them they cannot entirely dismantle all fiction from it. Thus, the blackbird will for ever in my mind have about it the aura of an Indian Nightingale, which species itself does not exist in all the world, but is an imaginary thing. The King was right when he said that I was "dreaming".
To assist me in my task of forgetting, I have begun to pass some time each day with Katharine, it being my conviction that if I could help but one person at Whittlesea to a cure and see them walk out from here, I would start to feel useful and in this new-found usefulness confront my future, whatever it is to be, and not look so enviously at my past.
Though she is sometimes very confused, believing herself to be in Hell, Katharine will often share with me some secrets of her old life, describing to me how her husband was a stone mason and how, before he left her, he once took her with him to the dark, dusty space between the vaulted ceiling of a church and its roof and there committed with her acts of great profanity. She is able, also, to describe her symptoms to me, how, when she lies down to sleep, a pain comes in her abdomen and a great suffocating pressure on her head and how, if she falls into a state of almost-sleep, some spasm of her heart will put her body into a convulsion.
I have understood why Katharine tears her clothes: she is making what she calls "windows" for her limbs to see through, it being her belief that all of her mind and body must be watchful at all times, lest any come near her to do her harm or betray her. If her arms and trunk and legs are covered up, she has the notion that her body has become "blind."
Washing herself, I have observed, solaces her, particularly the washing of her feet, over which task I have seen her fall into a kind of trance. At one Night Keeping, I discussed this last phenomenon with Ambrose. The next day, he told me that he had spent the rest of the night awake, reading his medical books and had come upon something that he had half remembered – that the rubbing of the soles of the feet with black soap may succeed in drawing down from the brain the noisiness within it and so still it and let it rest.
This cure, then, I have begun to try upon Katharine. I sit by her and put her naked feet upon my lap, a cloth under them, and some warm water near me in a bowl. And I immerse the black soap in the water and hold her ankles with one hand and with the other chafe the soles of her feet with the soap. Always, she sits quietly while I perform this somewhat strange task and watches me intently, as if I were some work of ancient art recently excavated from a tomb.
My arm and wrist tire easily. I have not the stamina for this task of foot rubbing that I would like. But if I can continue with it beyond twenty minutes, I am rewarded by seeing Katharine's stare fade and her eyes blink and her head begin to fall onto her chest. Three times, she has truly fallen asleep for several minutes without any spasm or convulsion coming upon her, but the moment I cease my rubbing with the soap, she wakes. And now I feel most vexed that Ambrose and I have discovered a thing which is and yet is not a cure.
Still no opinions have been offered upon my outpouring at the Meeting. Pearce has informed me that the Friends are pondering my ideas, "somewhat forward and arrogant though your speech was, Robert", but this is all. But I am privately pursuing my search for the footsteps of Katharine's madness, in the expectation that these, when revealed to me, will help me to make her well. And it has been made plain to me through this search that Katharine is a woman of a most loving yet childish nature. So, together with Eleanor, who is gifted at sewing, I have made Katharine a doll out of rags (its face painted in oils by me with a small brush) imagining that if she were to grow to love it, it might comfort her at night, just as a doll or toy will comfort a child. It is a very crude thing, having no hands nor feet nor hair and dressed in a simple smock which, immediately the doll was given to her, Katharine removed and tore in pieces. She stared at the doll for a long time. After a while, she pulled some straw from her mattress and made a kind of nest of it on the stone floor and then laid the doll in the straw and called to the women near her to see what she had done. They pressed round her. One laughed a high squawking laugh, another tried to talk, but could only drool and dribble. Katharine looked from them to the straw and to them again. " Bethlehem," she said.