Rose Tremain - Restoration

"What?"

"I cannot find my ladle. I think it has fallen and rolled under the bed."

I knelt down and felt about in the dust under his wooden bed, but could not discover it. I moved round and round the bed, searching under it as far as my arm would reach, but the thing was not there.

"I cannot see it, John."

"Please find it, Merivel."

"Why do you call me 'Merivel'?"

"Did I call you that?"

"Yes."

"When in truth you are… who? I cannot for just this one moment remember your other name."

"Robert."

"Robert?"

"Yes."

"And yet tonight, since this fever began… that name Robert seems to have slipped away from my mind and what I remember is Merivel and how we once together witnessed a very miraculous thing and that was a visible beating heart. Do you recall that?"

"Yes, I do, John."

"And you, because I could not, put your hand in and touched it."

"Yes."

"Yet the man felt nothing."

"He felt nothing."

"So pray for me, that I might become that person."

"Why?"

"To feel no pain in my heart or anywhere."

"Are you in pain?"

"Have you found the ladle?"

"No. It does not seem to be under the bed."

"Please try to find it."

"I do not know where else to look. Where shall I look?"

"Ssh. Don't raise your voice. You will wake the others."

"I shall wake the others unless you tell me about the pain. Is it the pain you had before, in the lung?"

"Could anyone have stolen my ladle?"

"No. And I will find it for you. Where is the pain, John? Show me or tell me. Where is it?"

Pearce looked up at me. His faded blue eyes, in this dim rushlight, looked a darker colour than they were. He withdrew his hand and placed it, in a hesitant way, against his chest.

I stood up. I told him I refused to continue my search for the ladle until I had listened to his breathing. Then I gently helped him to turn onto his back and folded back the bedclothes and laid my head (which a mere half hour ago Katharine had taken in her hands and forced to suckle her breast like a baby) first on his sternum and then lower on his diaphragm.

I found Pearce's ladle under his pillows and handed it to him. I told him I was going to boil water for a balsam inhalation, then I left him for a while and went to my room and washed myself, for the smell of Katharine seemed to cling to every part of me. I put on a clean nightshirt and combed my hair. Only then did I go down to the kitchen and begin to prepare the only remedies I and all the world of medical science could offer for my friend's condition, knowing as I worked that this time they would not be strong enough to make him well.

What I began that night and what we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, continued between us for ten days and nights was a constant vigil at Pearce's bedside.

On the fifth or sixth day, the pain of his breathing became so great for him that he whispered to me: "I would not have imagined longing, as ardently as I do, for my last breath."

We gave him opiates and as these entered his blood (there to be circulated to every part of him, as proved by his beloved mentor, WH) he seemed to fall, not into a sleep, but into a kind of dream of the past, so that he babbled to us of his mother who had been a widow for twenty years and who said prayers every day of her life for the soul of her dead husband, a barber, who had left her nothing but the tools of his trade with which, as soon as her son had been accepted into Caius College, she cut her own throat. She was buried not in the churchyard beside her husband, but "at a crossroads, distant from the village; a place where people on foot or on horseback or in carriages went this way or that, but did not stop." He told us how, if we opened his Bible at Matthew, Chapter Ten, we would find "the imprint of a bird across the writing." He said he could not remember what species of bird it was, only that it was small and that he had found it "freshly dead when I was a child and my mother still living." He seemed very anxious that we should see this imprint, so I took up his Bible and searched for it and found eventually – not in Matthew, but across two pages of Mark – a brown greasy smudge, such as might have been made by the accidental placing on the Holy Book of a hot cinnamon pancake. I showed it to Pearce. "Is this it, John?" I asked. He stared at it, his dilated pupils having difficulty focusing upon it. "Yes," he said at last. "The viscera were removed, for I did not want to pollute the words of Jesus. And then I laid the bird in and opened out the wings and closed the book and put weights upon it and pressed it like a flower."

I looked up at Hannah, who sat on the other side of Pearce's bed, bathing his brow from time to time with lavender water. She shook her head, showing me that she did not think this story about the pressed bird could be true, both of us being obliged to imagine the stench of the dead creature as it decayed in its tomb of sacred words. Had Pearce been well, I would have made the observation that the scent of death in a vertebrate does not resemble at all the scent of death in a flower, but, very far from being well, Pearce was by this time so weak that he could barely raise his head from the pillow, onto which what remained of his thin hair was gradually falling out.

The knowledge that Pearce was going to die was, during those ten days, like something draped round me, something that I wore but refused to take into my mind. And I do not think that this refusal was based upon any false hope that Ambrose or I could save him. What I had understood, I believe, is that no amount of knowing in advance that I was going to lose my friend could adequately prepare me for the actual loss of him when it came.

On the seventh or eighth day of Pearce's sickness, both the pain in his lungs and his fever diminished for a while. He asked me to lift him up and prop him with cushions "but not any with tassels or jewels on them or any gaudy ones such as you had in your house." I smiled. I put my hands gently into his armpits (where there seems to be no flesh any more, only a webbing of skin) and pulled him towards me while Daniel set some pillows at his back. I asked him if he would try to eat a little broth. He said he would and Daniel went down to fetch it for him (there is broth always ready in this household, the boiling of bones with onions and greens being a very frequent sight in the kitchen), thus leaving me alone with Pearce.

I sat down beside him, just within reach of his breath, which smelled of sulphur. He began to talk, quite lucidly, just as he once did at Bidnold, about the theory of spontaneous generation, in which he has never truly believed but which seems proven by the appearance of the living maggot upon dead matter. "Is it possible, Merivel," he asked, "that the maggot is not spontaneously generated but – as has been hypothesised – emerges from an egg so small it cannot be seen by the human eye?"

"I think it is possible, John."

"And thus, it would follow, if the human eye cannot see these infinitely small things, there may be other pieces of matter of whose existence we have not yet the slightest perception, would it not?"

"It would."

He sighed. He was silent for a long while. Then he said:

"It troubles me to take with me to my grave so much that I do not know."

"I would rather you did not talk about the grave, John," I said.

"Of course you would," he said acidly. "There are many matters, ever since I met you, on which you would have preferred me to remain silent. But that has not been my way. And now, there is one uncertainty I do not wish to carry with me. And that is what is going to happen to my things."

"What things?"

"Those few that are precious to me. You once called them my 'burning coals' in order to mock me."