Restoration

Two things brought me a little solace at this time: the first was the knowledge that Fi

We did not talk very much about the Court, nor about the precarious nature of our two lives. We talked about Norfolk and our mutual fondness for its wide skies and its wet wind and the order and peace of its great parks. We talked about the Indian Nightingale: how, each in our own fashion, we remembered it as a significant thing. And we talked about Katharine and the peculiar ways in which, without meaning to, we sometimes bind ourselves to another person for all eternity.

With Fi

As the astrologer had predicted, the breaking of the waters of Katharine's womb occurred in the early morning of the twenty-fifth of February.

I dressed myself quickly and lit rushlights and positioned them round the bed. Frances Elizabeth put coal on the fires and went out to fetch the midwife, who lived in St Swithins Lane. Fi

The midwife was a shy person, small, even dainty. She looked like a flower-seller. I said to Frances Elizabeth, "Perhaps you have fetched the wrong woman?" But I was shooed away. Women are the sole overseers of birth, as if the process of it must be kept forever secret from men.

Before I left the room, I asked Katharine whether she was afraid. She replied that the pain of the body had no terrors for her, only the pain of the mind. "Your leaving of me I fear," she said. "Nothing else."

I breakfasted with Fi

I idled my way home, stopping to buy some opium grains from my apothecary, in case Katharine should need to be stilled to sleep after the baby was born and then calling in, as had become my morning habit, at The Faithful Dray for a glass or two of wine. By the time I returned to Cheapside it was past mid-day and as I walked in I expected to be informed that my son, Anthony, had come crying into the world.

But he had not come. The house was noisy with women, neighbours of Frances Elizabeth who had come to help and gossip and wait. They built up the fires to an even greater intensity, dousing the coals with acrid-smelling potions. One of them made a batch of twenty-eight jam tarts. Another, who was a laundress like Rosie, washed all the crib blankets and dried them on a clothes-horse in the parlour. Another sang Scottish songs, one for each of her seven children and one for the eighth child who had died.

From time to time I was given news of Katharine. The labour was slow. Her body, for all that it was large, was weak. It could not seem to help the child to be born. And slowly the afternoon came on and then the dusk and still Katharine laboured, submitting every ten minutes or thereabouts to pain so severe that I could hear her cries even in the parlour where I sat and waited, passing the time by playing arpeggios upon my oboe.

Fi

It was morning, however, when I did wake at last. I pulled my limbs into a sitting position and listened. After a moment I heard Katharine's cry come, but it was a weak, piteous cry, as if she really did not have the strength to make any sound at all.

I crept up the stairs and knocked on the door of the bedroom. It was opened by the midwife and she let me come in. I went to the bed, beside which Frances Elizabeth was sitting, holding Katharine's hand in hers. At that moment, the pain came again to Katharine's body and I saw her arch her back and open her mouth to scream, but, as I had guessed, her exhaustion was so great that no scream came. I looked at her face, and then touched it gently. It was waxy and cold and her lips were white and cracked. "Katharine…" I whispered, but she could not speak or even smile.

"What is to be done?" I said to the midwife.

"The baby is large, Sir, and she ca

"What is to be done, then?"

"We can do nothing. Only wait and pray."

"And then?"

"If she begins to slip away…"

"What?"

"I have seen the mother begin to slip away, and then there is only one way to save her."

"To cut into the womb?"

"Yes. To send for a surgeon."

I nodded. I looked at Frances Elizabeth, but she did not look at me. She knew perhaps as well as I that to save Katharine the surgeon would sacrifice the child, even cut it out from her body, limb by limb.

I left the room and went downstairs to the parlour. The fire was low, so I put a little coal on it. I knelt before it and did not move.

At half past ten, I heard two of the women go out and I knew that they were going to try to find a surgeon.

Then I got up and went into the kitchen and heated water and washed my hands. I knew precisely what I would have to do.

An hour later, the women returned. They did not bring a surgeon because at this time of plague no surgeon could be found.

Fi

"Merivel," he said (for this is how he addresses me now). "What are you going to do?"

"Fi

He swallowed. Then he took up the woollen cloak under which I had slept and wrapped it round himself, and stood huddled inside it, as if it were old Bathurst's cowshed – a place of retreat.

Then I began to give my orders. I told the midwife to wash Katharine's abdomen and to put clean linen under her. I sent two of the women to fetch pledgets and bandages; to another I gave the opium grains and told her to pound them and mix them with water.

Meanwhile, I fetched my scalpel and my suturing needle and cleaned them. In my heart, I felt not fear, as I should have done, but a welling of excitement that seemed no less intense than that which I had felt in the coal hole of my parents' house when I dissected the body of a starling.

I went up to the room. Katharine's eyes were glazed and staring, her breathing shallow like the breathing of the little dogs I had once tended.

There were six women in the room. When a little of the opium mixture had been dribbled into Katharine's mouth, I positioned them like sentinels – two to hold down her upper body, two to hold her legs and two (including the midwife, for whose small careful fingers I was about to be grateful) to help me.