Restoration by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

their death hares, foxes, badgers and even stags. The walls of his great hall are hung with game-keepers' poles, hunting whips, the skins of foxes, badgers and marten cats and the heads of deer, its floor strewn with marrow bones for his dogs, which are kennelled there and do their business all over the parquet.
    I am fond of Bathurst. His claret is excellent and his table manners worse than mine. His conversation is pure drivel, but spoken with a perpetual passion, emphasised by his constant farting and thumping of the table. Though his memory has left him, his spirit has not. His friends, he tells me, have deserted him; he does not know who they were or why they have gone, but he senses a void, a vacancy, where once there was conversation and laughter, and seems delighted that I should be there to fill it up a little. Confusingly, he appears always to remember my name, or rather his own Anglicised version of if. Merryvale. "Welcome, Merryvale!" he thunders, across the braying and barking of the dogs. "Welcome and Good Cheer and Devil take the Laggards and the Hindmosts!"
    If I were, like Pearce, prone to Godliness and guilt, I might find myself a little discomforted by the fact that, attached as I am to Bathurst, I am deceiving him. For I am embarked, I will now admit, on a most agreeable affaire de coeur with his wife, my Lady Bathurst, or, as I call her in the intimacy of her chamber, Violet.
    Violet is some thirty years younger than her husband and a most handsome person, very witty and smart. She called on me not long after I took up residence at Bidnold Manor, and, on that very first meeting, related to me the lamentable state of Bathurst 's mind, putting particular emphasis on his forgetfulness of her existence, thus bringing into my head at once the idea that there could be something between us. For a man who has forgotten that he has a wife cannot care a great deal about which bed she chooses to inhabit, or with whom. Our amours are not of the tearing and clawing kind, but agreeably hot for all that and tolerably frequent, Violet being at that age when she sees her beauty starting to vanish and so wants to make hay while the sun still shines, albeit less radiantly than in her youth, in which, by her own account, an abundance of hay was made and time seemed forever halted at summer.
    Thus it was to Violet Bathurst, lying in my arms under the silver and turquoise canopy of my bed, that I confessed my misery at my failure with art. "Without this," I said, "and abandoned as I seem to be by the King, I am a man without a direction and I very much fear that I will lose myself in drunkenness and excesses of all kinds."
    Violet looked at me sharply. She was already a little jealous of my young wife and had made me swear on a copy of Thomas a Kempis that I had no carnal knowledge of Celia. The thought that I would fall into excessive behaviour clearly alarmed her a great deal.
    "You must not worry, Merivel," she said, leaning on a white elbow and caressing the moths of my stomach with an elegant finger. "I will organise some painting lessons. I know a talented young man, very eager to make the acquaintance of gentry, who will be only too keen to oblige. I commissioned a portrait of Bathurst from him, and, considering that Bathurst is not able to sit still for a second, the finished work was admirable. His name is Elias Finn – a Puritan, one rather suspects, but so keen for advancement and success that he cuts his coat according to the times. He is desperate, of course, to get to Court, and perhaps, if he proves a good teacher, you might be able to set him on the road?"
    "You forget, Violet," I said miserably, "that it is now three months since I had a word from the King."
    "Is it? Then perhaps you should go to London?"
    "I have no position at Court any more."
    "But surely, His Majesty would be overjoyed to see you?"
    "That I cannot know."
    "He used to give you kisses, Merivel."
    I smiled. "You and I both know, Violet," I