She pulled away from my embrace and looked at me squarely. She put her hands on her hips.

"For how long?" she asked.

"What?"

"How long will you stay? A week? A month?"

"Well," I said, "I cannot say. It may be difficult to find rooms, for I will not be the only one seeking them."

"Then I must have compensation, Sir Robert."

"Compensation for what?"

She sighed and turned away from me, busying herself with the lighting of a lamp.

"Can you not guess?" she said.

So then I understood. It was not merely the "craze for washing" or the perfuming of pillow cases with lavender that had caused Rosie to prosper. With Pierpoint gone, she had resumed her whore's antics with a ready will and it was the money got in this way that had enabled her to buy capons and cream and all the rich foods she could no longer live without. And I thought how strangely my mind had worked, over the years, with regard to Rosie Pierpoint. I had known from the start that she was a drab and a jade but, whenever I had needed her, I had put this knowledge from me, liking to imagine her on her own, doing her work and eating her meals and rising at dawn to perform her little ablutions that I had once witnessed, and never ever picturing her with other men. It is the same thing, I said to myself, as the story of the Indian Nightingale: I have believed what it pleased me to believe.

I crossed to Rosie and put my hand out and stroked her hair. "Of course," I said, "there will be compensation. But now let us go to bed and love each other and drive from our minds everything but this – even the smut and the soot."

I found two cold, airy rooms above a lute-maker's shop on the south side of the river. The sounds of the lutes came up through the cracks in the floor, stretched and fragile and thin.

Autumn rain fell onto the blackened city and turned the ash to paste and bloated the river so that all the half-burnt wharves fell away and floated on the water to the sea. I looked out of my high windows and tried to rebuild London in my mind as it had been. But I found that I could not remember how it had been, so that it was lost to me entirely and this realisation made me so moody and sad that I fell into the habit once again of staring for very long periods of time at the backs of my hands as if I vainly believed that I, Merivel, could remake the city.

I was not alone in feeling this sadness. For every person that I treated for burns in the months following the fire, another came to me with an ailment he could not name except to call it "a melancholy of all the body and mind." I laid red balsam and barley water on the burns, but I did not know what to lay upon the melancholy. More than once my thoughts returned to Wise Nell and her blood of swallows. In short, I began to wonder whether all cures of sadness do not have within them some element of magic that is beyond my understanding.

Listening to the lute maker, and the skittering of rain on my windows I, one evening, turned my hands round and began to trace the lines on my palms, to see whether I could read a future there, but I could not, for no one had taught me how to interpret the creases. I noticed, however, that the love-line – particularly that of my left hand – divides very soon after starting and becomes two. This discovery not only made me smile, it also encouraged me to believe that other accurate knowledge was indeed written on my hand if only I could read it correctly and so began, in an indolent sort of way, a search for a chiromancer which I soon abandoned, it seeming to be the case that full half of everyone left in London professes and calls himself a chiromancer and for small sums of money will snatch up any hand and claim to see in it some glorious destiny. One told me that I would discover a cure for old age, another that I would be saved from drowning by the eating of a quail pie "because that you inadvertently ate the feathers too, Sir, and so it is they will buoy you up above the waves", and another that I would be remembered for ever for a deed I had not yet done or a journey I had not yet made. I was at first very adept at pretending to believe such predictions, but then this pretence suddenly wearied me and I became indifferent to all versions of my future and able, as the autumn passed and the winter came on, to live each day for itself and not to waste too much time dreaming.

I had no word from the King. I did not expect any, for after the burning of the house in Cheapside he had no immediate means of finding me, no way of knowing, even, that I had not perished in the fire. I could have written to him, but I did not. For it seemed to me, as my fortieth birthday approached, as if I had spent so much of my swiftly passing existence composing letters to the King in my mind that I had run out of words.

And this is what I believed: I believed that if, one day, the King wanted to find me, he would find me. I did not know how. I could not even imagine how. I only knew that he would. And that it would not prove to be very difficult for him, for such is his power that surely no corner of his Kingdom is invisible to him and no person within it beyond his reach?

One day in early spring, being invited to a little supper party by a lawyer I had cured of an ulcer, I took down my navy blue and cream coat (cleaned and restored by Rosie to its former smartness) and the matching silk breeches to put them on. Having no looking glass in my rooms above the lute-maker, I had become somewhat neglectful of my appearance, only now and then catching sight of myself reflected in a window pane. Thus I had not seen what I now saw in putting on my suit: I had grown most peculiarly thin. The waist of the breeches was too large for me by more than two inches, so that the wretched things would not stay up, and, when I put the coat on my back, it hung out from my body like a cape. I pulled up my shirt and regarded my stomach. It appeared shrunken and a little wrinkled and all the moths on it, having lost so much of their territory, were crowded up together in a dense mass.

I sat down upon one of the four chairs with which these rooms are furnished (a chair so delicate and spindly I often wonder whether the lute-maker did not manufacture it himself as a diversion from hollow things) and tried to read my altered appearance, like the reading of a palm, for what it signalled and what it portended. For in the whole of my life I have never been thin. I was a podgy baby, so my mother used to tell me, and the moire suit I wore as a boy was always stretched so tight across my chest that I remember minute buttons exploding from it sometimes when I laughed. Even as a student I was fleshy and by the time of the fifth beginning to this story I was, as you will recall, very comfortingly fat. Now, all the flesh was falling away and every bone in me being slowly unsheathed and made visible. It was impossible not to think of Pearce wasting to stick and sinew inside his clothes, and so as I sat there – a thin man on a thin chair – I began to consider the possibility that I was dying.

I examined my memory for aches and hurts. I listened to my own heartbeat and to the noise of my breathing. I got up and pissed a little into a pot and stared at my urine, looking for cloudiness and beads of blood, then smelled it, like a connoisseur of wine, sniffing for acid and putrefaction. Then, forgetting entirely about the lawyer's supper party, I took off the too-large clothes and lit a quantity of candles and placed them near to the window and so was able to see myself mirrored in it. Anyone on the river looking up would have chanced upon a most hilarious sight: Merivel, as nude as Adam, peering at parts of his anatomy – his tongue, his armpits, his nipples, his nose, his groin and his knees – for signs of swelling or discoloration, shivering a little in the cold March evening and appearing altogether as scrawny and fanatical as the original naked Quaker of the burning coals.