Then, being in the mood for letter-writing, I took up the quill again and wrote to Will Gates, telling him all that had happened to me and requesting that one of the grooms ride my horse to London. And when I thought about Danseuse, I marvelled at the notion that so swift and fine a creature could still belong to me.

Some weeks passed, during which Finn's portrait of me began to emerge (like a face coming out of a Norfolk mist) from the white canvas. In it, I appear somewhat grave – as if I were a reeve or a librarian – yet my eyes are filled with light. Finn wishes to title the picture A Physician, thus rendering me anonymous, but I do not mind. The only nuisance was that I had to sit still for several hours at a time with my hand uncomfortably poised in the act of taking up the scalpel from my box of surgical instruments.

I watched the picture carefully for any signs of fiction and untruth. But I am glad to say there were none. Behind my head is no imagined Utopia, but some plain, dark panelling. I congratulated Finn. I told him this was the best work he had ever done and saw a very foolish grin break out over his face.

In these weeks of the portrait, we offered to leave the house in Cheapside, and indeed I was anxious to leave it for I did not like sleeping in the bed where Katharine had died. But Frances Elizabeth wept and begged us to remain, so I replied that I would stay until summer. Finn, I suspected, would remain longer than that, so fond did he seem to be of the room where he slept and where he now worked upon the picture, thus forcing Frances Elizabeth to do her letter-writing in the parlour. But she never complained about this dispossession. She was ready to make any sacrifice to keep at bay her widow's loneliness.

In late spring the portrait was finished and in the same week Danseuse was returned to me.

I was much moved by both things.

I was not flattering Poor Robin when I told him the picture was very fine. It was no gaudy piece of work: it was sober and dark. Yet the face of A Physician, lit by a cold watery light, reveals the warring complexities within him – his love of his vocation and his fear of what it reveals to him.

I gave Finn seven shillings for it, one tenth of what he might have got from a rich man, but almost all the money that remained to me after I had paid the groom for his journey with Danseuse and found stabling and oats for her.

She was in excellent condition. Her rump gleamed. Her saddle and bridle had been soaped and polished and in the saddle bag was a letter from Will, which ran as follows:

Good Sir Robert,

It was a mighty joy to me to get a word from you and know you are in London, where God keep you safe from the Plague.

I am sending a Boy with your mare, she has been galloped a little every day and fed good hay so do not fear we have put her out of our mind.

I can report this same bad Pestilence is come to Norwich where most terrible for all. Except, on getting a smell of this news, the Viscomte de Confolens has gone back to France and is no more seen here, which is not terrible but mighty excellent, for I and M. Cattlebury we did Detest and Loathe him. Pray he will not return.

We are glad your life goeth on and we send you our blessings for your little girl Margaret which is a name well loved in my family and in all Norfolk I do think as well.

Your servant, Wm. Gates

Having read Will's letter which – as his letters always do -made me remember him very fondly and brought to my mind my easeful life at Bidnold of which he had been a part, I was impatient, suddenly, to get up on my horse and be reminded of what it was to ride about the streets, instead of tramping through the mud and dirt of them on foot.

I rode first to Shoe Lane, to the little dark shop of an engraver that I used to pass when I had my rooms in Ludgate. I went in there and ordered to be made a small brass plaque with the words R. Merivel. Physician. Chirurgeon. chased into it.

I then remounted and turned Danseuse round and put her to a pleasant trot. And, trotting all the way, we went along Blackfriars and crossed the river at Southwark Bridge and so came in a very short time to the house of Rosie Pierpoint.

I will not deny that what followed was very pleasant. If I had once believed that my desire for Rosie had been snuffed out by the loss of other, more precious, things, I now saw that, after all that had passed, its vital flame still had a little breath.

While I have become thin on Quaker porridge and widow's stews, Rosie has prospered and grown fat and the sweet dimples above her bottom are deep and when she smiles there is a fold of flesh under her chin. And these things delight me.

She told me that, since the plague came to London, there has been "a craze for washing and for the boiling of pillowcases in lavender water" and that she could not remember a time when her business had "blossomed out more."

No longer did she eat meals of fish and bread: now, she was able to buy chickens and pies from the cookhouses and cream from the dairies. She worked hard but, as a reward, she spoiled herself. She believed that her fires and her cauldrons of perfumed water and the good food she ate kept her safe from the plague "for it is the poor and the cold who die from it, Sir Robert, and not the likes of me."

We lay in her bed all afternoon and I told her the decision I had come to, which was to set up in London as a doctor and surgeon once again and to make my living in this way and no other. And she sat up, leaning on her elbow, stroking the moths on my stomach with her fat little hand and said, "Everything, then, will be just as it once was, before you went to Whitehall," and I was in no mood to contradict her, so I nodded and replied, "Yes. As if the time between had not existed."

I left her towards evening. As she put a wet farewell kiss upon my mouth, she told me that the King had returned to London. "But take care," she said smiling, "that you do not go near him, for you do not want your life to go round in a circle!"

I did not go near him. Of course I did not.

I borrowed two shillings and ninepence from Frances Elizabeth to pay for my brass plaque and I nailed it to her door, under her own sign, Letters Written.

As the summer came on, the plague appeared to be dying down and, because people believed that it was leaving them, they had no cause any more to despise the physicians. And so the sick and the hurt of Cheapside and its neighbourhood began to come to me – some sent by my old apothecary friend, some because they had seen my sign, and some cast upon my doorstep by the tide of rumour and gossip that washes through the coffee houses and the taverns.

Most often, I would be fetched by some relative or neighbour of the sufferers and so would treat them in their homes; sometimes, they brought their wounds or their pain to me and there was no other place to receive them and tend them than the parlour, so that in time it became an operating room like those we had had at Whittlesea and Frances Elizabeth, chased out of her letter-room by Finn, was now deprived of her parlour by me. Even now, she did not complain. She bought a little escritoire and put it in her bedroom and wrote her letters there, her hand and her phrasing becoming more and more elegant and assured as time passed and her fear of solitude diminished.

On Tuesday afternoons – as was my old habit – I would visit Rosie and we both grew very comfortable with this arrangement, neither of us wanting more from the other than these few hours could give. I no longer gave her money, but I would take her gifts of food: a dressed capon, a jar of mincemeat, a pat of butter. And sometimes we would eat a little supper together, sitting at her table by an open window and listening to the sounds of the water.