I felt very hot, just as I had at the Meeting where I had suggested the story-telling and the dancing, and so I suspected that some words were going to come out of me, but did not know that when I spoke them they would reveal to me something that I had not, until I uttered it, understood. I wanted to stand up, but my legs felt very weak, so I continued sitting down and then I said: "In the silence which has fallen since John died this morning, I have listened and waited. It is as if I have been waiting for some word, not from John, nor from God, but from myself to myself and now it has come…"

Still, I did not know precisely what the supposed "word" was or what I was going to say next. I paused and took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow, and then I said: "In this quiet, I have understood one thing. And it is this: that all my love for women which, before I came here, was a very trumpeted and tempestuous thing, and even all the love I thought I had for my wife, Celia… all these loves were mere deceptions and not love at all, but only vanity and lust, for which I am ashamed. And in all my life I have truly loved only two people on earth, and these two are John Pearce and the King."

At the shock of hearing the King's name put beside Pearce's, all the Friends raised their eyes and cast upon me their sternest looks. I opened my hands in a gesture of helplessness, "You will straightway say," I continued, "that my love for John Pearce is worthy and my love for the King unworthy and that I should, as indeed John often told me, cast it out from me. But it seems that I cannot. For whatever I do and however far I travel from my former life, I still find it there. But it is no longer a greedy love. It asks nothing. It is like the love for a dead man; it is like my love for John. For I will see neither man ever again. I will never be with them. All I understand tonight is that these two people I have truly loved – wisely in one particular, unwisely in the other – and that no one else on earth has ever counted as these two have counted with me. And for this knowledge, which may have come to me from the Lord or from some other place, I feel grateful."

The flush that had come into my face and body subsided after some minutes, despite my awareness that the eyes of all the Friends were still upon me. The air was very close with their displeasure and I expected them to start speaking out against me. But they did not. And I imagined each one of them wrestling with his or her anger and conquering it for the sake of quietness and for the sake of John.

And so the night went on and became morning and at six o'clock, we drank some chocolate and ate some biscuits which seemed to me to taste most strangely of charcoal.

Towards midday of the tenth of September, Pearce was put into his grave and the yellow clay of Whittlesea packed tightly around and above him. I had made certain that the ladle was put into the coffin with him before the lid was nailed down.

But at the graveside I found myself remembering how, at Cambridge, some cunning thieves calling themselves "Anglers" had tried to steal it and all Pearce's possessions from him. They worked with a long pole, on the end of which was a hook made of wire, and such a pole had been thrust through Pearce's open window one night while he slept. He had woken up to see a chair moving in a glimmer of moonlight three feet off the floor and floating out through the window. "It was only," he told me, "when the pole came back into the room and I saw it move towards my ladle that I understood there were villains at work and not ghosts. And so I cried out angrily, and my shouting frightened them and they ran away." He laughed when he had told me this story and then he said: "Perhaps it is always easier to frighten away the living than it is to frighten away the dead? What do you think, Merivel?" But I cannot remember what I answered.

Chapter Twenty-One. Katharine Asleep

As you will have noticed by now, I have no great gift for solitude. After the death of Pearce, however, a longing to be alone began to possess me.

If I had still had my horse, I would have ridden out of the gates of Whittlesea and turned northwards and gone on until I came to the samphire fields and the dunes and the sea. What I would have done when I got there, I cannot say. Perhaps I would have sat down on a jetty smelling of tar and looked out towards Holland and turned my mind to the King's war for which my house and lands were helping to pay. Perhaps I would simply have sat down and remained sitting until I was mistaken for one of the Idle Poor and sent by an Overseer to a workhouse.

At all events, I could not get to the sea. I walked vainly out along the causeway to Earls Bride, but the sight of this sad place made me turn back. On my return, I had a waking dream of the empty, circular room in the West Tower at Bidnold. It was a dream of a place of light.

I returned to my linen cupboard and lay down on my cot and there was a silence in the house which soothed me for a little while. But then I began to hear all the accusations and lamentations to come, and I put my hands over my face. When I thought about Katharine, I felt cold and sad in all my limbs. She repelled me. No longer did I pity her, even, because it was for her sake that I was about to be driven away from Whittlesea and put back into a world where I had no place. And I had begun to believe that she – no less than those lost to a violent insanity, such as Piebald – was indeed corrupted by devils and that the evil in her had infected me and made me play the beast with her and that when I did these things I was not myself, but a man possessed by Satan. Pearce, by dying, had made me turn aside from my foulness. He had saved me. What I longed for now was to be quite alone with the memory of him; yet what awaited me was Katharine's pleading for one kind of love and the Friends' sadness at my betrayal of another.

I got up off my cot. I went out into the soft soundless rain. I walked to Pearce's grave and stood and looked at the letters of his name which have been burnt into a thin cross made of willow wood which, as the seasons pass, will surely warp and bend and become pale and so start to resemble his actual body. "John," I said, "I do not think that I shall ever find peace."

Some days after the burial of Pearce, I told the Friends, at the end of a Meeting, that I was ready to speak about the sins I had committed, but I requested that I should be allowed first of all to talk to Ambrose privately. There was some opposition to this, it being the Keepers' belief that secrets are very venomous things, "likely to bring illness and even death to any group or corporate body where they are permitted to breathe." But they had seen how greatly I had been affected by Pearce's abandonment of me and so granted me what I asked, out of sorrow at my weakness.

The parlour fire was lit, the autumn evenings now seeming chill. Ambrose seated himself before it and I knelt on the hearth rug like a penitent, warming my hands.

Though very filled with a nervous sickness, I began to speak with a strong voice. I told Ambrose that it was in my nature to be immodest and lecherous and how, as a young man, I had neglected my work at St Thomas 's to go in search of women in the park and take them back with me to my rooms at Ludgate. "My fall from the King's favour, the very thing that made me take the road to Whittlesea," I said, "was caused by lust. Though I had promised never to lay hands on my wife, my desire for her became so great and importunate that I could not stop myself from trying to touch her, thus making myself utterly ridiculous, causing her a deal of distress, and bringing the King to a great fury. So you see, Ambrose, that this greed I have to possess women has been a bitter enemy to my prosperity and indeed to my reason. There have been times when, recognising this, I have found myself lamenting the fact that women had ever been created!"