Rose Tremain - Restoration

I laid the problem before the Keepers, but none had any solution. That the tarantella had had some beneficial effect on those allowed out that afternoon seemed certain; what was also certain was that, in those we had kept chained up, the music and clapping and shrieking had engendered feelings of rage and despair that took many days to subside.

Suggestions were made. Edmund declared it might be feasible to chain the inhabitants of WH one to another and lead them out across the Earls Bride causeway, out of earshot of the music. Hannah ventured that we could give them opiates to drug them to sleep. But we held back from approving either of these ideas, the reason being that both of them made us feel uneasy.

And so the clamour for the dancing went on and with it a clamour of another kind, which was from Katharine, who truly believed herself in love with me and whom I could not approach without she entreated me to touch her. The sight of her black hair, her strong legs and her full breasts began to occupy my mind to such a horrible degree that even as I sat at Pearce's bedside and covered his head, while he inhaled my balsam preparations, or I laid poultices on his crown, I would feel this clamour of Katharine in my body and I would grow hot and sometimes breathless and sick in my stomach. Then, silently, I would curse the day I had taken pity on her, and feel scorn for myself in the realisation that even in this action I had been moved by words once spoken to me by the King, so that even at Whittlesea – far, as I thought, beyond his reach – I was not yet entirely free of him.

Several visitors to Whittlesea were turned away by us during this time, our fear of bringing in the plague still being very great. One of these visitor's was Katharine's mother. She had brought her daughter a honeycomb and a pair of green slippers with some fine embroidery on them. When Ambrose informed her that she could not come in, she grew very angry and declared that all who care for the mad and the sick, though they pretend to be charitable people, are the greatest deceivers of the age, their only aim being to line their own pockets. She walked away still cursing Ambrose so violently that she, too, appeared to be touched with madness.

Eleanor gave the honeycomb and the green slippers to Katharine. When she knew that her mother had been turned away, Katharine began to cry. She told Eleanor that a cure for her condition existed in the world but that we were all too blind to see what it was.

July came in and, in this month, three things of importance took place.

The first of these things was the arrival of another letter from Will Gates, informing me that my horse, Danseuse, had walked in through the park gates at Bidnold "a little lame in her left hind leg and with no bridle on her, but only a saddle, twisted round." Will asked me to write to him, to tell him I was alive. "If you are alive, Sir, "said the letter, "I will continue to keep and hide your horse from the V. de Confolens, so that you can get her for you again. But if, as I fear, you are dead, I will send W. Jossett, your groom, with her to the King, so that His Majesty can know of your sad end."

This letter, if I had not been so very preoccupied by the condition of Pearce and by the behaviour of Katharine, would have gladdened my spirits a great deal, not only because it made me laugh, but also because the news of Danseuse's return seemed to me miraculous and therefore to portend some good. As it was, there did not seem to be adequate space in my mind for the tidings that it contained.

Keeping an afternoon vigil by Pearce's bed, while he slept his snarling invalid's sleep, I wrote a short letter thanking Will and enclosing money to buy oats for my horse. "I do not know," I said in this letter, "how or if ever I shall come again to Bidnold, so if I have not come there in the space of one year from now, please return Danseuse to His Majesty the King and say that I am no longer in the world."

The second thing of importance was the beginning of a recovery in Pearce. I confess I felt not only relieved that my friend seemed to be retreating from a premature encounter with death, but also gratified that my syrups and balsams, my insistence upon rest and good nourishment (I had devised for Pearce a very good diet of coddled eggs, boiled meat, chicory and malted bread), were the means by which he seemed to be returning to health. When I listened to his breathing now, I could still hear a wheezing in the lungs, but the balsams and the Sal Ammoniac had helped him cough up a great quantity of phlegm from them and the burdock poultices had turned the moist patch on his crown to a dribbling sore, from which much foul matter was able to come out.

After three weeks, in which he slept every afternoon and was content to let us bring him his meals and to wash him and comb his sparse hair and generally care for him like an infant, he began to protest that he was cured and ready to resume what he called his "proper task, which is not the comforting of myself, but the comforting of others." So we let him get up and helped him to put on his clothes that were still very much too large for his thin body, despite the eggs and the malted loaves, and he came downstairs and went out into the sunshine and asked me to walk with him to the vegetable garden so that he could see his pear trees.

It is a feature of Pearce's character, as I think I may already have told you, that he believes himself to be the only person upon earth capable of carrying out certain tasks, one of which is the cultivation of fruit trees en espalier . It was thus that he expected, after three weeks' absence from them, to find his trees dead and shrivelled, and when he saw that they were not, despite the great heat of the last month, he assumed at once that it was God who had saved them and he knelt down in the vegetable garden and gave up thanks to his Maker when, in reality, he should have given up thanks to me and to Edmund who had spent many tedious hours watering the wretched trees, aware as we were of Pearce's wrath and sadness if we should let them die. I was tempted to inform him of this, but I did not. I stood and watched him praying and I knew that, as always, my irritation with him would not last, it being so diluted by my affection for him that it is like a single drop of aloes in ajug of mead. So, instead of reproaching Pearce, I, too, found myself conversing with God, who seems nearer to me here that He ever seemed at Bidnold. I asked Him to bring my old friend back to perfect health and I added: "I will remember to call him John, Lord, if you will remember to put some flesh on his bones."

And so to the third event of this month of July which, of all the things that have happened since I came to Whittlesea, is the worst thing, for now it haunts me continuously and I know that the shame it brings upon me is so great that were the Keepers to know of it, I would be sent out from here – my long friendship with Pearce notwithstanding – and ordered never to return.

It took place on a hot night which seems to have been so short, it was as if there was no darkness at all, but only a fading of the sky and then a lightening of it again.

I woke not long after midnight, having slept for only a few minutes. I felt full of trouble and fearful dreaming. Every part of me was sweating and filled with such an aching discomfort that I knew I could not lie another minute in my bed.

I stood up and looked out of my window and all that my eye would light upon in this particular pale midnight was the door of Margaret Fell and I knew that my struggle against my lust for Katharine was lost.

I put on a thin shirt and some breeches and then I let myself quietly out of my room and paused and listened in case any of the Keepers was stirring, but the house was silent except for the sound of Pearce's snoring.