Restoration

During the night, what is called a "Night Keeping" is made at two o'clock by two of the Friends together and we take it in turns to undertake this task, for which we must rise from our beds in the darkness and go in to each of the houses and make sure that none of the mad people is hurt or ill or trying some foul deed upon another. I dread the nights when I must take part in a Night Keeping. I dread most particularly the sight of Katharine sitting up and making rags of her clothes. I have made up some ointment of saffron and orris and I smoothe this upon her temples, but as yet it has had no effect on her. It is always past three before I can return to my bed (there being always some malady to attend to or some comfort to give) and then I find myself so truly woken up by what I have had to do that I ca

On my arrival here at Whittlesea, I made some attempt to justify my love for Celia to Pearce, describing it as a generous love, a love which was "useful", as the King would have it. He did not agree. He told me I was deluding myself. "It was an intemperate love," he said and, quoting Plato, informed me that "the intemperance of love is a disease of the soul," words which I have written down on a piece of parchment and wrapped around my oboe and put inside the sea chest I have been given in which I keep my wordly goods.

For reasons which are not yet clear to me, my mind seems to enjoy its greatest repose during the Friends' Meetings. I am quite silent within them. In the month that has passed, I have not been moved – by God or any other voice within me – to say anything at all. And sometimes very little is said by anyone and all we do is to sit in a semi-circle by the parlour fire.

It is most odd that I should even tolerate, let alone draw strength from such prolonged bouts of silence. At first, I was most restless at Meetings and impatient for them to be ended and felt my thoughts flying away from the room to lost places. One evening, Ambrose passed to me a piece of paper and asked me to read the words written on it and these were they: "Be quiet, that you may come to the summer, that your flight be not in the winter. For if you sit still in the patience which overcomes in the power of God, there will be no flying." And from that moment, I truly tried to be quiet and not to loathe but to love quietness, and so I began to fare better at the Meetings and at last to feel myself revived a little by the affectionate presence of John, Ambrose, Edmund, Ha

And when they speak, prefacing even the most ordinary observations by "It has come to me from the Lord," I find myself very touched by what they have to say, so that I want to laugh. And this feeling of suppressed laughter is the nearest I have come for a long time to happiness.

I always wear my wig for Meetings so as to spare John and the others the sight of my hogs' bristles. There is a tidiness about the way they arrange the chairs that I don't wish to spoil. With the wig on, however, and with one of my coats (usually the black and gold, not the red) replacing the leather tabard, I resemble very nearly the Merivel of my former life and invisible under this old finery is the Robert of now. He is present, nevertheless. He is grateful for the warmth of the parlour fire and for the voices of Ha

Chapter Sixteen. The Scent of Flowers

The winds have gone and the air of April is still and quiet and warm. In the Airing Court, the big oak is putting out leaves of a green so succulent it brings saliva into my mouth. I do not precisely wish to eat these leaves but yet want to posses them in some way before the newness of them vanishes.

It has not rained here for some time and through the yellow crust on the mud of Whittlesea new grass is springing up and in the ditch outside the wall there are primroses and violets. Pearce seems most entranced by these flowers, as if he had never seen nor smelled any like them before. Not only does he pick them and examine them; I have observed him lie down on the edge of the ditch and stick his nose into a clump of primroses and not move for ten minutes at a time. I know from the vacant look in his blue eyes that his mind is at work on some experiment with regard to the flowers, but I have not asked him what it might be lest he infer from my interest in the thing a renewal of a more profound interest in biology.

Ha

There is, adjacent to each of the main rooms of George Fox, Margaret Fell and William Harvey, a small ante-room, lit with oil lamps, in which patients are examined and cures and operations tried upon them. Before my arrival, Pearce and Ambrose were the only two physicians among the Keepers at Whittlesea and so to them fell the task of trying to alleviate madness with the knife. Now, I have been forced by Pearce to "render service to Whittlesea by placing such skill as you possess in the service of the common good", or in other words to join in the cutting and blood letting and to do it without complaint, for Pearce's eye is always upon me, watching and measuring. He knows very well how I recoil before this return to my former vocation. He knows also that were he and the other Friends to put me out from here, I would be at a loss to know in which to direction to ride.

Mercifully, I have not yet been required to perform any large operations, but there is, by those who study insanity, a great faith put in phlebotomy, and this we undertake daily. The degree of suffering felt by a man who must have his head held over a bowl while a scalpel opens a vein in his temple I ca