Rose Tremain - Restoration

I knew that I was in a Place of Impossibilities. I left it as quickly as I could, but still fell to wondering in a more general yet fanciful way why the likeness was so profound and whether – in a world so tormented by fashion – there was some unlikely connection between haberdashery and gentleness of spirit, between the measuring of buckram and a soft heart.

That night, because she was in my mind all evening, I had a dream of my mother. She came and looked at my portrait. She put her hand up to the canvas and scratched away at it until she had obliterated a bit of my forehead and revealed the white pigment underneath. Then she said: "On the surface, he is whole, but beneath the surface, he is filled with a most peculiar broken light." And then I woke and remembered the words of Wise Nell, the so-called witch in Bidnold village, how she had said that I would suffer "a long fall", but had not said what would come after it, whether there would be any end to it or any after, or whether I would go on and on falling deeper and further into confusion.

Some moments passed. Then I rose and lit a taper. And, stealthily and secretly – as if I imagined faces beyond the window looking in and observing me and sneering at my weakness – I took down Pearce's book, lifted out my letter to the King and read it through. Then I wrote the King's name upon it, melted some sealing wax with the taper flame and sealed it. "It cannot be helped," I whispered to the anonymous faces outside in the dark, "for I shall have no peace nor be cured of my yearning till I have some word from him…"

The next day, I delivered the letter to Whitehall and hurriedly came away.

While waiting for the King's reply – to take my mind out of the waiting – I went to the money-lender's house to visit Margaret.

She was asleep in her crib. Only her sleeping eyes and her flat nose were visible to me, but I could tell from her pink colour and her regular breaths that she was not ailing or sickly and the wet-nurse informed me that she sucked well and cried with great strength "and seems altogether very likely to live, Sir". And so I felt a sudden piercing joy in the realisation that this baby, whom I had brought into the world with my own hands, would grow to childhood and beyond childhood and that I would watch her growing and come to love her and take her on Sundays to the Vauxhall woods to look for badgers. And these thoughts were quite new and strange to me, so that it was difficult to believe that it was I who was thinking them.

I gave the wet-nurse some money.

"How long until she can be weaned?" I asked as I left the room.

"A good year, Sir," she said. "I do not let any of them go until then." She smiled and lightly tapped her breasts, as if showing me riches of which she was modestly proud. Behind her, two of her girls, both with pretty ringlets, smiled and giggled at me and then dropped each a little cheeky curtsey. I bowed to them, feeling my face flush.

As I trotted back to Cheapside on Danseuse, I thought what an unlooked-for pleasure it would be for me to have a pretty daughter. I imagined hiring for her a maid, who would wash her petticoats and curl her red hair into ringlets. But then I remembered that Margaret appeared to have my features (not the straight, thin nose and dark eyes of her mother) and so she would never be pretty. Indeed, she would probably be categorically ugly and so come to the only future that these times allow to ugly women – unless they be famously rich – which is a future of loneliness and low estate. So I began to consider how I might prevent this, by getting for her teachers of music and teachers of petit point and scholars who would guide her not only through the poetry of Dryden but through the work of all the great poets from the beginning of time, so that her accomplishments and her wisdom would get her a kind husband if her face did not.

For some while, as I rode, my thoughts turned upon Margaret's future and upon the great unfairness in society (once noted by me at an autopsy at Whittlesea) which allows men to prosper by many means and women by one means only. Until I turned into Cheapside, I felt most vexed, on behalf of my daughter, at the great unkindness and stupidity of this, but then the sight of my plaque upon the door drove everything from my mind but the expectation that, during my absence, an answer to my letter to the King had arrived. I dismounted and hurried in. There was nothing for me.

"Why do you ask?" said Frances Elizabeth. "Are you waiting for some news?"

"No," I replied, "it is only that my apothecary said he would send word when a curative I asked him to prepare for me was ready. He lacked some of the essential ingredients…"

I do not remember how many days passed before a letter arrived. What I remember is that time began to move very slowly once more and that I spent a great deal of it imagining myself grown old and the King grown old, and in all the years that passed no answer ever came, yet my expectation that it would did not diminish and so all that filled my life was a waiting that never ended.

I became very prone to error. A patient came to me with a pain in his gut that I diagnosed as a bleeding. I performed a "sympathetic phlebotomy" to stop the haemorrhage, but a day later he returned and showed me an iron nail brought up out of his stomach by means of a vomit, prescribed by a rival physician. My diagnosis had been so faulty as to put the man's life in danger. He made me take the nail in my hand and advised: "Put it where you can see it each day, so you are reminded of your error- that this mistake will drive out others."

I did as he advised, being very chastened by this incident of the nail (though how a man could come to swallow such a thing I could not fathom, unless his wife or his cook had wished him harm and concealed the object in a pie). But this did not prevent me from making other, smaller errors and from becoming very forgetful and absent-minded, so that, during this time, I won not a single game of Rummy, lost my purse in a tavern, stuck my eye with a quill pen, fell off Danseuse when she shied at a pigeon in the street, missed a Tuesday afternoon (thus incurring a fierce slap to my face from Rosie Pierpoint) and began to fall behind with this, my story – as if I understood at last that I was not truly the author of it, but that every twist and turn in it had been set down by the King.

And indeed, the next episode in it had his controlling hand upon it: he invited me to supper! He did not acknowledge my letter so many times perfected, nor make any reference to its contents. His note was short and curt. It read thus:

Merivel,

Why do you not sup with us upon Sunday Next? We shall expect you here at our chambers at nine o 'clock.

Charles R.

I received it on the morning of Monday, the twenty-seventh of August, towards ten o'clock. I was in the middle of cauterising a thigh wound when it was brought in to me and I burned my hand with the cauterising iron in my haste to break the familiar seal. And then, when I had read it, my next thought was the thought of a vain man: that I had no outfit fine enough to wear.

The tailor I went to was an old friend of my father's. He made the suit in five days out of affection for him, not for me. The material I chose was silk and the colour navy blue, braided with cream. It was neither fussy nor gaudy and I was most pleased with my choice.

I then went to a shoemaker and ordered a pair of shoes with heels modestly high and buckles of pewter, burnished to resemble silver. Thence to a milliner's in Crofter Lane. The hat I commanded was black with two soft blue plumes upon it.

And so to my wigmaker. He looked at me long. He had not seen me for many months. "Sir Robert," he said, "if I had not known it was you, I would not have known it was you," which puzzling sentence made me laugh and it was in my laughter that he recognised me, for then he said, "But now I see you. Now I see that the change in you is not entire."