I could find nothing wrong with me. My heart sounded strong, my body was unmarked, except by its loss of fat and by time itself. I put on my nightshirt and lay down on my narrow bed and thought of everything that had happened to me since the fire and I saw that my life had become a somewhat solitary thing and that within it there was one abnormal phenomenon which was that now and again I would see and hear things that were not there. One of the things I heard was a dog yapping on the stairway. Once, I had been so certain that the creature was there that I had opened my door and expected it to come in wagging its tail, but there was no sign of any dog whatsoever. And the things I saw were no less troubling and inexplicable: I saw, growing on the slimy steps by Southwark Bridge, a clump of primroses which appeared so real to me that I bent down to pick one, but there were no flowers growing there, only a pale yellow handkerchief carelessly dropped by a fop pirouetting into a boat. Another time, I saw in the hand of one of my woman patients a lump of black soap, but when I uncurled her fingers her palm was empty.

I lay and considered what this hallucinatory tendency might portend – whether a weakening of my brain or the unlikely arrival in me of visionary powers. But I could come to no conclusion about it and after a while, with my eyes half open on the flickering candlelight, I fell into a dream of Bidnold, believing myself to be there, lying on the carpet from Chengchow and smelling woodsmoke and sunlight and the perfume of wealthy women. And the whole of this dream was filled with such magic that when I woke from it, to see all the candles dripping grease onto the floor, I did not move one muscle of my body, but only closed my eyes and tried to dream it again.

And after this night, what took hold of me was not any illness or sliding towards death, but a colossal epidemic of dreaming, so that night after night I floated into Bidnold and landed light as a plume and brushed the surfaces of things -the polished tops of tables, the stretched brocade of scarlet sofas, the milky satin of cushions, the tooled leather spines of books, the dented pewter handle of the coal scuttle – and then was carried by the wind out into the sky and hung like a ghost above the park, filling myself with colour so that I became fat with it, with the purple of the beeches and the lush green of the grass. There were no people in these dreams, yet they were dreams of the most sensual kind from which, when the morning came, I did not want to be parted. So I began to prolong them into the day, rising later and later, long after the lute-maker had begun work and the noise on the river had reached to its morning crescendo. I was addicted to them, as to an opiate, and went about my physician's round drugged by the memory of them and by the great quantity of sleep I was inflicting upon myself. I knew that I should be trying to shake off this sickness of dreaming, but I did not seem to have the will to do it.

One evening in April, the lute-maker came up to my rooms to show me an instrument he had made, the sound of which, he said, was the sound he had heard in his mind all his life but had never achieved until then.

To celebrate this new perfection, he brought with him a flagon of sack and, without noticing what we did, we consumed it all, little by little, so that the hour grew very late and our minds utterly addled and foolish. And in my drunkenness, I told this lute-maker about my dreams of a place that had once been mine and how every night, now, I returned there like a spirit and how I did not believe this dreaming would ever end. He looked at me with his eyes that are nervous and bright like the eyes of a buzzard and said to me: "Why do you not go there, Doctor Merivel? Why do you not see it again and then this seeing of it in your dreams will cease."

The next day, I wrote to Will Gates.

I told him that I had been possessed by a great longing to return to Bidnold, just for a brief time, no more than a day and a night, so that I could remind myself what it looked like and see with my own eyes "certain combinations of colour and light, Will, that I do not think exist anywhere in the world but there." I said I would be content to sleep in one of the servants' rooms, or even in the stables with Danseuse, because all that I wished to do was to visit the place "like someone invisible and not in any way to pretend it is mine or try to possess it again except in my mind."

While I waited for Will's reply, my dreaming of Norfolk was interrupted one night by a dream of Whittlesea and when I woke from it I decided that if indeed I was going to make the journey to Bidnold, I would not return directly to London, but go on to the Fens and tell the Keepers about the death of Katharine and the survival of Margaret and beg of them some other small relic of Pearce to replace the book consumed by the fire. And once I had decided upon this second visit, I no longer thought of this pilgrimage into the past as a foolish and self-indulgent thing. It seemed, on the contrary, to be a journey of the utmost importance: until I had made it, I would not be able to begin upon the future set down in my palm or indeed upon any version of the future whatsoever or come at last to any ending of this story.

I did not have to wait very long for a letter from Will and when it came it woke in me the same mirthful delight I had once felt in a stage coach at Will's first sighting of London.

0, Sir Robert, said the letter, You cannot know how much we are all here every one of us who remember you filled with joy at this Great Coming Event which is your Arrival at Bidnold.

Please, Sir, be assured we will make all very fit and nice for this fortunate Returning, viz- M. Cattlebury will bake a lardy cake and one of his Carbonados and all the Dust Sheets which do cover things since the V. de Confolens comes no more here will be taken off. And do not think you must have any poor bed in a stable. You can sleep in a Comfortable Room, viz- The Olive, where once we tended on Mister Pearce.

Send us merely some word of the day of your Arrival -for reasons of M. Cattlebury's purchasing the beef and seasoning it for the Carbonado. Which word he awaits with great Eagerness, as do I,

your servant Wm. Gates.

The date I decided upon was the twenty-ninth day of April in this year of cold spring rains and fitful sunlight, 1667. Because I wanted to ride to Bidnold on Danseuse, the journey would take me several days, but I knew that I would savour each stage of it, no matter what weather I chanced upon, and that when I found myself at last under the enormous Norfolk sky, I would lift up my head and shout.

It rained on the day that Danseuse and I left London, but after that, as we went north-east, we came upon cloudless days.

As we traveled, I asked myself what changes I expected to find at Bidnold and I knew that what would be most visible to me would be the emptiness of the place, its lack of belonging. The Viscomte, as far as I could determine from Will's letters, had only ever used it as a place of entertainment and seduction. He had never inhabited it fully or bothered to grow fond of it and now he never visited it at all or paid the staff their wages. Will and Cattlebury had remained, paid by Babbacombe I assumed, but I imagined the gardeners and the grooms and the chambermaids and the scullery boys all drifting away, so that little by little the house and the garden and even the park would be falling to neglect and decay. I thought of Will's sadness at this. I saw his brown, creased face. I saw him plead with me to do something to halt the decline of a place that he loved as much as I, and heard myself inform him that I could do nothing at all, it being out of my hands now and quite outside my life.