Chapter Nineteen. In God's House

At the back of WH, enclosed by a low fence, is a graveyard. I was not shown this when I first came to Whittlesea, but discovered it for myself soon afterwards. There are at present six graves in it and I have been told that they were dug by the men of George Fox, "one of whom in his life before he came to madness was a grave-digger and can dig a very perfect and neat grave."

I asked Ambrose whether, when a man or woman died at Whittlesea, the body was not given back to relatives for burial in some place that might have once been their home. Ambrose replied that if the relatives came and asked for the dead person the corpse would be put in a coffin and given to them, "but few do ask, Robert, it being the case that very many of those here are deemed by their families to have died already." It was this remark of his, upon which my mind has often dwelled, that has helped me to believe in the death of Merivel and his replacement by Robert. Alas, however, Merivel now and again finds the grave an excruciatingly boring place and clamours to come out of it. I fear he may never be entirely quiet and obedient to death until he is actually buried (here at Whittlesea?) and the only sound to be heard near him is the sound of the Fenland wind in the grasses.

As Ambrose, Pearce and I began, then, on an autopsy of the woman found dead in Willian Harvey, a grave-digging party, under the care of Edmund, set out with picks and spades. The day was once again hot and I saw that as they assembled in the Airing Court, a cloud of flies gathered round their heads. These flies made me feel depressed. In what had remained of the previous night, I had had a dream of Fabricius at work in his little anatomy theatre. He had been in an angry, difficult mood and had told us, his students, that we preyed on his knowledge – having so little of our own – like flies on a cadaver.

Towards ten o'clock, the body of the dead woman was laid on the table in the operating room in Margaret Fell. (There is, as I have told you, such a room in all three houses, but very few operations are performed in that of WH, the noise coming from the stalls of the inmates being too disturbing and distracting.) Ambrose, Pearce and I, wearing our leather aprons, slit open and tore away the ragged clothes that covered her and then we stood silently for a moment, each looking at the body and taking note of what we saw of external wounds and marks.

The woman was old, of more than sixty years, and the skin greyish and wrinkled and the muscles of the limbs and of the stomach seeming wasted and slack. The hair on her pubis was sparse and white and there was some of this same hair sprouting on her chin and on the aureoles of her nipples.

Ambrose began to record all abnormal things he found upon her, such as a red soreness of the naval and a bruising on the area of the sternum and Pearce wrote each thing down. I went to her head and took the jaw in my hands to open it and examine the teeth, which were very black and decayed and reeking of putrefaction, and so I reported out loud on my findings to Pearce. But I was so affected by the sight of the body that I could not refrain, at length, from saying: "Does it not strike you as a most terrible but true thing, that men in this world and age can come by fortune in many ways and have many currencies with which to barter, but that women have only one, and that is the currency of their bodies, and when this is spent they must all, high or low, depend upon the charity of some overseer or other?"

"In a Quaker house," said Ambrose, "all are equal before God."

"I know," I said, "but not in society. In society, all women who come to forty come to an impoverishment of a certain kind."

"For this and a thousand other reasons," said Pearce, "have we turned our back on society. Neither Hannah nor Eleanor will ever be 'poor' in the sense that you mean."

"No," echoed Ambrose, "they will not."

"So be glad that you are here, Robert, and not where you once were."

In this way, adding a sniff that was like a neat full-stop to his sentence, Pearce declared the subject I had raised to be closed. Many of my utterances he believes to be a waste of my breath-"and we are allotted just so many breaths, Robert, and no more" – and indeed this one was a digression from the main purpose of the morning, which was to ascertain how the old woman had died.

None of us had been aware that she had been suffering from any illness, only a debility coming on her with old age and the ravages of her madness. Upon the opening up of her chest, however, we found the organ of the heart to have an encrusted and scabby appearance and the blood of her arteries and veins to be dark and sticky like treacle; and it did not take Pearce long to conclude that death had come with the cessation of the heart's pulse, the blood being too heavy to move. Ambrose and I nodded our agreement and I, for one, was relieved that we did not have to proceed to an examination of the liver or bowel. The autopsy concluded, Ambrose left Pearce and me to sew up the incision we had made and to clean and wrap the body for burial. I took a suturing needle from my box of instruments and Pearce was measuring for me a length of gut when he suddenly declared: "I am afraid of death, Robert."

I looked up at him, surprised. Towards the great subject of mortality Pearce had always shown an enviable indifference. When, on one of our angling trips near Cambridge, he had fallen from a little wooden bridge and almost drowned in the blanket-weed, he had shown neither fear of death nor gratitude towards me for saving his life by thrusting towards him a landing net with which I towed him into the bank. I had always believed that he thought of death as a kind of reward for his earthly goodness and abstemiousness and that in his hard-working life he sometimes found himself looking forward to it.

As I began to sew up the dead woman's chest, I now said as much to him. "You of all people I did not think would be afraid of it, John," I said. And he nodded. "Until recently, I was not," he said, "but for a month now – and I am telling this to you, Robert, and to no one else, for I do not want to trouble the others – I have felt certain symptoms come upon me, certain symptoms…"

"What symptoms?"

"Well… this catarrh of mine…"

"It's no more than a catarrh."

"And a very cold sweating on the crown of my head…"

"Just part of the rheum or catarrh, John."

"And a violent coughing and choking at night, with much pain in my lung."

"Pain in your lung?"

"Yes."

"How great is the pain?"

"Sometimes so great that I want to cry out."

The flesh of the dead woman, pinched between my finger and thumb for the suturing, was icy cold and I now felt slide into my heart a cold worm of fear.

I stared at Pearce. "Are you telling me that it is pain in your lung that has given you thoughts about dying?" I asked him.

"Yes. For it does not seem to go away. Nor this cold sweating of my head, despite the hot weather."

I said nothing. I finished sewing up the wound and together Pearce and I washed the woman and inserted wads of flax into the damp orifices of the body and put the winding sheet round it. Then I said: "Let me come to your room after the Meeting this evening, and I will examine you."

"Thank you, Robert," said Pearce. "And you will tell no one?"

"No. I will tell no one."

"Thank you. For they are such good people, are they not? I would not have them lose any sleep on my account."

I had been troubled all morning by thoughts of Katharine, my lust for her being of that most loathsome kind, where the very feelings of loathing seem to excite rather than to repel.

Now, hearing that my friend was ill, everything went from my mind, and I wished only for the day to pass so that I could make my examination of Pearce and allay his fears and mine by discovering in him some ague that would soon leave him – and nothing more.