I had gone on, undiscovered in the Time of Madness, for about five weeks when, returning one night to my room near one o'clock, I heard a voice call out, "Merivel!"

I stood on the landing, shivering a little, certain that Robert had been found out at last and was being summoned as Merivel to be given his punishment. I waited and the voice called again, "Merivel!" And then I recognised it as Pearce's voice and I moved slowly towards his room.

I opened the door. He had lit a rushlight by his bed and was lying on his side with his face very near the taper and he held one of his thin hands out towards me, palm upwards, in the gesture of a beggar.

"John," I said, "what do you want?"

"Merivel…" he said again, and his voice sounded thick with his old catarrh, "I was waiting for you…"

"Waiting for me?"

"To come in. I heard you go out and I waited for you to return, so that I could call you and not wake the others."

"Yes," I said. "I go and walk in the air sometimes at night, if I cannot sleep…"

"I heard you."

I went nearer to Pearce. I know him so well that I can discern anger on his lips before he has uttered a word and I looked hard at him to see if it was there or not. It was not there, and the relief I felt was very great. What I could see, however, as I approached his bed, was that his face was running with sweat and that his cheeks (usually of such translucent whiteness it is difficult to believe that Pearce spends any of his time in the open air, let alone a great part of his day hoeing and pruning in his vegetable garden) had a hectic bright redness to them, the two things announcing to me at once that he had a high fever.

I went to him and laid my hand on his forehead. My hand burned.

"John…" I began.

"Yes. Very well. There is some fever. I was about to tell you that. I did not call you to repeat to me something I already know."

"Why did you call me, then?"

"I called you because…"

"What?"

"I cannot find my ladle. I think it has fallen and rolled under the bed."

I knelt down and felt about in the dust under his wooden bed, but could not discover it. I moved round and round the bed, searching under it as far as my arm would reach, but the thing was not there.

"I cannot see it, John."

"Please find it, Merivel."

"Why do you call me 'Merivel'?"

"Did I call you that?"

"Yes."

"When in truth you are… who? I cannot for just this one moment remember your other name."

"Robert."

"Robert?"

"Yes."

"And yet tonight, since this fever began… that name Robert seems to have slipped away from my mind and what I remember is Merivel and how we once together witnessed a very miraculous thing and that was a visible beating heart. Do you recall that?"

"Yes, I do, John."

"And you, because I could not, put your hand in and touched it."

"Yes."

"Yet the man felt nothing."

"He felt nothing."

"So pray for me, that I might become that person."

"Why?"

"To feel no pain in my heart or anywhere."

"Are you in pain?"

"Have you found the ladle?"

"No. It does not seem to be under the bed."

"Please try to find it."

"I do not know where else to look. Where shall I look?"

"Ssh. Don't raise your voice. You will wake the others."

"I shall wake the others unless you tell me about the pain. Is it the pain you had before, in the lung?"

"Could anyone have stolen my ladle?"

"No. And I will find it for you. Where is the pain, John? Show me or tell me. Where is it?"

Pearce looked up at me. His faded blue eyes, in this dim rushlight, looked a darker colour than they were. He withdrew his hand and placed it, in a hesitant way, against his chest.

I stood up. I told him I refused to continue my search for the ladle until I had listened to his breathing. Then I gently helped him to turn onto his back and folded back the bedclothes and laid my head (which a mere half hour ago Katharine had taken in her hands and forced to suckle her breast like a baby) first on his sternum and then lower on his diaphragm.

I found Pearce's ladle under his pillows and handed it to him. I told him I was going to boil water for a balsam inhalation, then I left him for a while and went to my room and washed myself, for the smell of Katharine seemed to cling to every part of me. I put on a clean nightshirt and combed my hair. Only then did I go down to the kitchen and begin to prepare the only remedies I and all the world of medical science could offer for my friend's condition, knowing as I worked that this time they would not be strong enough to make him well.

What I began that night and what we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, continued between us for ten days and nights was a constant vigil at Pearce's bedside.

On the fifth or sixth day, the pain of his breathing became so great for him that he whispered to me: "I would not have imagined longing, as ardently as I do, for my last breath."

We gave him opiates and as these entered his blood (there to be circulated to every part of him, as proved by his beloved mentor, WH) he seemed to fall, not into a sleep, but into a kind of dream of the past, so that he babbled to us of his mother who had been a widow for twenty years and who said prayers every day of her life for the soul of her dead husband, a barber, who had left her nothing but the tools of his trade with which, as soon as her son had been accepted into Caius College, she cut her own throat. She was buried not in the churchyard beside her husband, but "at a crossroads, distant from the village; a place where people on foot or on horseback or in carriages went this way or that, but did not stop." He told us how, if we opened his Bible at Matthew, Chapter Ten, we would find "the imprint of a bird across the writing." He said he could not remember what species of bird it was, only that it was small and that he had found it "freshly dead when I was a child and my mother still living." He seemed very anxious that we should see this imprint, so I took up his Bible and searched for it and found eventually – not in Matthew, but across two pages of Mark – a brown greasy smudge, such as might have been made by the accidental placing on the Holy Book of a hot cinnamon pancake. I showed it to Pearce. "Is this it, John?" I asked. He stared at it, his dilated pupils having difficulty focusing upon it. "Yes," he said at last. "The viscera were removed, for I did not want to pollute the words of Jesus. And then I laid the bird in and opened out the wings and closed the book and put weights upon it and pressed it like a flower."

I looked up at Hannah, who sat on the other side of Pearce's bed, bathing his brow from time to time with lavender water. She shook her head, showing me that she did not think this story about the pressed bird could be true, both of us being obliged to imagine the stench of the dead creature as it decayed in its tomb of sacred words. Had Pearce been well, I would have made the observation that the scent of death in a vertebrate does not resemble at all the scent of death in a flower, but, very far from being well, Pearce was by this time so weak that he could barely raise his head from the pillow, onto which what remained of his thin hair was gradually falling out.

The knowledge that Pearce was going to die was, during those ten days, like something draped round me, something that I wore but refused to take into my mind. And I do not think that this refusal was based upon any false hope that Ambrose or I could save him. What I had understood, I believe, is that no amount of knowing in advance that I was going to lose my friend could adequately prepare me for the actual loss of him when it came.

On the seventh or eighth day of Pearce's sickness, both the pain in his lungs and his fever diminished for a while. He asked me to lift him up and prop him with cushions "but not any with tassels or jewels on them or any gaudy ones such as you had in your house." I smiled. I put my hands gently into his armpits (where there seems to be no flesh any more, only a webbing of skin) and pulled him towards me while Daniel set some pillows at his back. I asked him if he would try to eat a little broth. He said he would and Daniel went down to fetch it for him (there is broth always ready in this household, the boiling of bones with onions and greens being a very frequent sight in the kitchen), thus leaving me alone with Pearce.