"It is a poisonous congestion, is it not?" said Pearce, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, which I now saw were very heavy with tiredness.

"Yes," I said.

"And the sweating and coldness in my head?"

"Probably a beneficial evacuation. A means by which the matter is endeavouring to come out."

"And if it does not come out?"

"We will bring it out. But you must rest, Pearce."

"John."

"John, then! But you will be neither one nor the other and no name will matter one whit, if you allow yourself to die!"

"I cannot stay in my bed, Robert, when there is so much work to do here."

"You must stay in your bed, or the remedies I shall prescribe will have no help from you, only hindrance."

"No, I cannot. For we must reveal nothing of this to Ambrose or the others."

"Pearce," I said crossly, "please do not make me lose my patience! Have I not, a hundred times since we met at Caius, allowed you to command me and let you be wise and done this or that thing at your bidding? I have! So do not even consider contradicting me on this score. For I am determined you will do this one thing that I am ordering you to do, and that is to stay here in your bed and let us care for you and not to stir from this room till you are well. And if you do not do this, John, you will no longer be my friend or any true Friend to Whittlesea. You will be in your grave!"

Pearce then allowed his head to fall back on his pillow and he nodded. "Very well," he said, "but only for a little time. What will you prescribe?"

"Syrup of roses to warm your blood and soothe your coughing. A burdock poultice or a bread poultice for your head."

"And for the slime in the lung?"

"Sal Ammoniac."

"And a balsam?"

"Yes. We shall try several, dissolved in boiling water and inhaled."

"Good. It has all returned to you then, Robert?"

"What has returned?"

"The right knowledge for the right time."

"Perhaps."

"As of course it had to. For we can never truly unknow what we have known or unsee what we have seen, can we?"

"Probably not, John," I said. "Now please do me the favour of taking off your breeches and putting on your nightshirt."

Two weeks passed, during which I wished to turn all my thoughts and all my strength to the cures I was trying upon Pearce. But they were weeks in which I found myself subjected to a great clamouring from the people of George Fox and Margaret Fell who, whenever I went among them, begged me to let them come out and dance once again, informing me that dancing was the only cure for them and that all their madness was caused in the first place by the absence of music.

I laid the problem before the Keepers, but none had any solution. That the tarantella had had some beneficial effect on those allowed out that afternoon seemed certain; what was also certain was that, in those we had kept chained up, the music and clapping and shrieking had engendered feelings of rage and despair that took many days to subside.

Suggestions were made. Edmund declared it might be feasible to chain the inhabitants of WH one to another and lead them out across the Earls Bride causeway, out of earshot of the music. Hannah ventured that we could give them opiates to drug them to sleep. But we held back from approving either of these ideas, the reason being that both of them made us feel uneasy.

And so the clamour for the dancing went on and with it a clamour of another kind, which was from Katharine, who truly believed herself in love with me and whom I could not approach without she entreated me to touch her. The sight of her black hair, her strong legs and her full breasts began to occupy my mind to such a horrible degree that even as I sat at Pearce's bedside and covered his head, while he inhaled my balsam preparations, or I laid poultices on his crown, I would feel this clamour of Katharine in my body and I would grow hot and sometimes breathless and sick in my stomach. Then, silently, I would curse the day I had taken pity on her, and feel scorn for myself in the realisation that even in this action I had been moved by words once spoken to me by the King, so that even at Whittlesea – far, as I thought, beyond his reach – I was not yet entirely free of him.

Several visitors to Whittlesea were turned away by us during this time, our fear of bringing in the plague still being very great. One of these visitor's was Katharine's mother. She had brought her daughter a honeycomb and a pair of green slippers with some fine embroidery on them. When Ambrose informed her that she could not come in, she grew very angry and declared that all who care for the mad and the sick, though they pretend to be charitable people, are the greatest deceivers of the age, their only aim being to line their own pockets. She walked away still cursing Ambrose so violently that she, too, appeared to be touched with madness.

Eleanor gave the honeycomb and the green slippers to Katharine. When she knew that her mother had been turned away, Katharine began to cry. She told Eleanor that a cure for her condition existed in the world but that we were all too blind to see what it was.

July came in and, in this month, three things of importance took place.

The first of these things was the arrival of another letter from Will Gates, informing me that my horse, Danseuse, had walked in through the park gates at Bidnold "a little lame in her left hind leg and with no bridle on her, but only a saddle, twisted round." Will asked me to write to him, to tell him I was alive. "If you are alive, Sir,^" said the letter, "I will continue to keep and hide your horse from the V. de Confolens, so that you can get her for you again. But if, as I fear, you are dead, I will send W. Jossett, your groom, with her to the King, so that His Majesty can know of your sad end."

This letter, if I had not been so very preoccupied by the condition of Pearce and by the behaviour of Katharine, would have gladdened my spirits a great deal, not only because it made me laugh, but also because the news of Danseuse's return seemed to me miraculous and therefore to portend some good. As it was, there did not seem to be adequate space in my mind for the tidings that it contained.

Keeping an afternoon vigil by Pearce's bed, while he slept his snarling invalid's sleep, I wrote a short letter thanking Will and enclosing money to buy oats for my horse. "I do not know," I said in this letter, "how or if ever I shall come again to Bidnold, so if I have not come there in the space of one year from now, please return Danseuse to His Majesty the King and say that I am no longer in the world."

The second thing of importance was the beginning of a recovery in Pearce. I confess I felt not only relieved that my friend seemed to be retreating from a premature encounter with death, but also gratified that my syrups and balsams, my insistence upon rest and good nourishment (I had devised for Pearce a very good diet of coddled eggs, boiled meat, chicory and malted bread), were the means by which he seemed to be returning to health. When I listened to his breathing now, I could still hear a wheezing in the lungs, but the balsams and the Sal Ammoniac had helped him cough up a great quantity of phlegm from them and the burdock poultices had turned the moist patch on his crown to a dribbling sore, from which much foul matter was able to come out.

After three weeks, in which he slept every afternoon and was content to let us bring him his meals and to wash him and comb his sparse hair and generally care for him like an infant, he began to protest that he was cured and ready to resume what he called his "proper task, which is not the comforting of myself, but the comforting of others." So we let him get up and helped him to put on his clothes that were still very much too large for his thin body, despite the eggs and the malted loaves, and he came downstairs and went out into the sunshine and asked me to walk with him to the vegetable garden so that he could see his pear trees.