Merivel A Man of His Time (30 page)

Then I saw that the woman had set aside her jar of pâté and had moved herself further forward on the seat, so that her bottom hung almost over the edge of it. And her glance was now fixed upon me.

I looked round at the other passengers, three men of differing ages and kinds, and they, too, had fallen to breathless silence, and were regarding me with expressions of Excitation and amusement on their faces. And after a few moments the man next to me, a red-faced Squire with large wens upon his nose, nudged my thigh and whispered to me, ‘
Allez-y, Monsieur. Pourquoi pas, si elle l’invite?
’

So then it came to me that all along – with her ostentatious sucking and swallowing of her rich pâté, and her tales of the Heat and the Pox – this ageing Drab had been manufacturing an invitation to Copulation and had only waited to see which one of us would accept it.

My breathing was now very laboured and hot. The carriage jolted on along the burning road. The woman raised three fingers of a fat hand and pointed to my pocket:
three livres
would be the price of it. I hesitated only a moment more, then I scrabbled for my purse, found the money and gave it to her, and in a trice I was kneeling and unfastening myself, and putting myself in her and tearing at her bodice to take one of her fat breasts in my mouth.

I rammed her very hard, and she lifted her legs and they clenched themselves round me. I closed my eyes. The excitation I felt was as fierce as anything I have ever known. I could feel the lascivious gaze of the other three men upon me, regarding the cheeks of my bare Arse moving just like a Chimpanzee in rut, and feeling the coach tremble and rock. And I thought that never in my life had I imagined myself doing such a thing, in front of strangers, on a burning foreign road, and I knew I should feel great Shame, yet I did not. I was Pure Beast and could only continue on in my crazed need to Spend, until it came and all my longing drained away.

When it was done, I fell back into my seat. I wanted to hide myself away.

I thought that never would I be able to tell anyone, man or woman, what I had done in a swaying coach on the road to Besançon.

I closed my eyes. But when I opened them again, what did I see but the Drab with her legs stretched out, chafing her Parts with the fingers of one hand and with the other, pulling at the nipple I had taken out from her bodice. And this, it seemed, filled every man in the carriage with such excitation (for that their wives or mistresses might never be so wanton as to pleasure themselves in front of them) and when she had brought herself to a palpably ecstatic
Jouissance
with a long shivering sigh, each now produced money, and one by one reached out to her. And so it was that they all took her, either rutting upon their knees as I had done, or pulling her onto their laps to bounce her great weight upon their erections. In not more than half an hour all four of us had had her, and she had got herself twelve
livres
.

When it was over the woman (whose name none of us knew, or cared to ask), being tired and sore, I supposed, laid herself down at our feet. She did not seem to notice or care that the coach floor was clotted here and there with Semen. She merely laid her head upon her arm and covered herself, and covered the money secreted between her breasts, and she fell asleep silently, while the men around me snored and farted, and the stench in the coach became worse than the stench of a Brothel. And I was overcome with a great sadness.

I longed to reach Switzerland. I imagined that there the world might not be so susceptible to a sudden raging Disorder of the senses as the one I had just been part of.

I put up at an Auberge in Besançon and washed the sour smell of the coach and the Drab from me, and slept a full twelve hours; and on the next day I crossed the border into Switzerland and followed the road to the great lake of Neuchâtel.

When my coach came within distant view of the water, I asked to be set down in a small village named Bellegarde. Here, in soft sunlight, I walked about, noting with tenderness very many vegetable gardens growing beside poor houses of wood, and orchards full of apple trees, heavy with fruit, and gaggles of Goats, hung with bells about their throats, grazing on sloping fields.

I paid a young boy two
sous
for a mug of Goats’ Milk and drank this as thirstily as I had once drunk milk at the gates of Versailles.
Then
I sat down upon a tuffet of grass, with my single Valise at my feet, and pondered what I should do, now that I was so near my destination.

I had the fancy to go riding in to the gates of the Château de Saint Maurice on a fine horse, thus making me seem, in the Baron’s eyes and in the eyes of Louise, a greater and taller man than I was. I thought longingly of Danseuse. No horse had ever seemed to me as beautiful as Danseuse, or had possessed so serene a nature. But she was long gone.

I called the goat boy to me and asked him where, in Bellegarde, I might hire a horse. But he told me that none there owned horses, only donkeys and mules, and though this dismayed me for a moment, I was then, all of a sudden, amused by the vision of myself on a biting mule. I remembered that what Louise de Flamanville had seemed to like in me was my ridiculousness and helpless absence of Vanity, and that all around our brief amours had trembled the sound of laughter.

The goat boy told me that the Château de Saint Maurice was but three or four miles from Bellegarde, ‘but higher than we, and they say you may have a very fine view of the Lake there’, and calling the goats into their pen, he took me to his father, a stooped man, sitting in the darkness of a low house, intent upon carving a pipe out of Meerschaum.

The mule he owned was small and thin. It had a hectic look in its eye.

‘Will its back be strong enough to carry me and my Valise to the Château?’

I enquired.

‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘but she will not walk.’

‘The mule will not walk? Have I misunderstood you, Monsieur?’

‘No. She will not walk.’

‘Then how am I to arrive anywhere at all?’

‘You mount. And then you will be whisked into a trot. Walking she will not do. Trot-and-stop. Trot-and-stop. This is her nature. Take it or leave it.’

So it was that I
bounced
my way up the forested path to the Baron’s house.

The sun was just beginning its decline, and the great oaks and firs that stood sentinel along the way took on a deeper and deeper blackness as I and the mule approached. Once again I had the disconcerting sense that it was my eyesight and not the sky that was fading. And I strained with all my might to bring light to the path, so that when the house appeared at last I would see it and recognise the circular turrets I had for so long imagined.

Then I saw it. It was built of stone, with a high slate roof, and high Mansard windows and tall chimneys – but no towers. I reined in the mule and, as if in astonishment at finding itself confronted by a turretless building, the creature deigned to walk slowly towards it.

Step by slow step, then, we neared it. I had been somewhat preoccupied by my bottom – its great soreness from coach and mule travel – until this moment, but now I was preoccupied by my heart, which set up a great and suffocating clamour. Sweat broke on my lip. My legs, in the too-short stirrups, felt weak.

And then, lo! Once again the wretched mule decided upon a trot and, as it strained forward, I was pitched back in the saddle, lost the reins and lost my balance altogether and – just as we began to circle the knot garden laid out before the great front door – found myself tipped out onto the gravel.

Relieved of my weight, the mule now began a mad canter round the knot garden, past the door, and returned at great speed the way we had come, with all my Possessions still strapped to its bony rump. The dust from its flying hooves was flung into my eyes.

I pulled myself to a sitting position. My left shin gave me some stinging pain. I sat there, breathing hard, wiping dust from my face – a round-shouldered Lump in the fast descending dusk.

Nobody came out of the house. I could hear, far off, the sound of lake water breaking on a stony shore.

‘Merivel,’ said I to myself, ‘this is a fine Kettle of Sprats.’

24

A COPIOUS AMOUNT
of blood began to leak from my leg and soak my stocking. Now, all at once, I could see and hear Buzzards circling above me in the twilight, so I attempted to scramble to my feet to avoid being pecked to death. As I brushed the grit and dust from my coat, a Servant in a periwig arrived at my side and gave me his arm to lean on, and lighted my way to the house.

I discovered myself in a wide hall, paved with stone flags, where a fire of pine cones was burning. Louise descended a wide staircase. She said my name softly. Behind her came her Father, the Baron, a tall man with a bald crown to his head, but with long white hair flowing out beneath, like the petals of a ragged daisy.

I bowed to them. They regarded me with plain astonishment, as though I might have been the Man in the Moon, suddenly fallen out of it. Near them two wigged Footmen stood at brisk attention, casting only sidelong glances at the blood from my leg dripping onto the stone.

‘Forgive me my sudden appearance,’ I managed to stammer. ‘I had hoped to make a more … appropriate arrival, mounted on a horse, but all I could get at Bellegarde was a mule, and veritably it liked me no more than I liked it and so threw me into the dust, and …’

‘Hush,’ said Louise. ‘You are horribly pale. You may faint if you talk any more. We shall see to your wound. Papa, this is Sir Robert Merivel, come out from England, and we must care for him.’

The Baron glided gently to me and shook my hand. I saw at once that in his lined face there still resided very lively hazel eyes.

‘You are welcome, Sir Robert,’ he said. ‘My daughter has talked much of you. Now, do you have a trunk to be taken upstairs?’

‘Alas,’ I said. ‘Though the mule did not take to me, she was much enamoured of my Valise and has cantered back to Bellegarde with it on her back.’

At this the Baron de Saint Maurice let out a whoop of laughter. ‘Ah, animals!’ he said. ‘How they surprise us.’ Then he snapped his fingers to the Footmen and I found myself lifted from the ground in a kind of Chaise, made only of the linked hands of these strong Servants, and carried upstairs.

Louise herself washed and dressed the wound on my leg, and applied to it some of the Salve that had been so efficacious for the rash on Margaret’s face.

While she dabbed and cleaned, I remained silent. I stared down at her sweet head. As she tied a bandage round my calf she said quietly: ‘My Letter was too hasty, Merivel. I am sorry. I could not know that your daughter had been ill. I was hurt by your Silence, but I was wrong to write as I did, in so petulant a way. I should have trusted you.’

She then raised her face and looked up at me. I might have kissed her, but I did not. After my shameful behaviour in the coach on the the road to Besançon, I found that all my carnal inclinations were stilled and that what I longed for was merely to be by Louise’s side, to savour her companionship, and only later – possibly many days and nights later – take her to my bed.

It was the hour when dinner was to be served and the thought of sitting at a fine table, with firelight dancing near, and the conversation of Louise and her father playing like a complicated melody in my ear, filled me with gladness. I imagined that – after long months of travail – my heart would at last be at peace.

There remained only the problem of my torn stockings and my general absence of clothes, but Louise at once found for me a fine crimson coat, frogged with gold, belonging to the Giraffe, with black Breeks and white silk stockings, this ensemble enhanced by an enormous white shirt, with lace fluffing out at throat and wrists.

Regarding myself, swamped by these garments made for a very tall man, I reminded myself of nothing more nor less than a Regimental Flag, a billowing ornamental thing, raised on a standard
in
some far-flung Field of Battle. As a Regimental Flag, quivering in the wind, I would have had some dignity, but as a man I looked utterly farcical. I descended to Dinner thus, with the crimson coat flapping round my calves and the lace at my wrists flouncing down over my hands.

The meal was delicate and served with wine produced on the Baron’s Estates. Louise had dressed herself in a low-cut blue velvet gown and laced ribbons in her hair. She wore at her throat a very fine pearl necklace and, seeing her thus, at her Father’s table, wearing exquisite yet unostentatious jewels, I understood how far she exceeded me in her Birth and Position: she was the daughter of Baron Guy de Saint Maurice of Neuchâtel in the Pays de Vaud, and I was the son of a humble Glovemaker from Vauxhall, and I had prospered in life only because I had a talent to amuse the King of England.

The Baron, however, being a man of courtesy, treated me quite as though I had been the most important Guest to have sat at his table in a long while – this notwithstanding the vexatious tendency of my lace cuffs to flop into the food, thus becoming horridly stained.

Having let me narrate the sad tale of Clarendon and his sordid end, he drew me into a conversation about animals and insects, in which we both agreed with those philosophers who refuted (at least as proven truth) the Cartesian notion of these creatures as automata and who were content to speculate on the existence of Souls among certain species.

‘Consider the ants,’ said the Baron. ‘With what selflessness they strive! I have even observed them forming a Bridge, claw-to-claw, across a little streamlet in the woods here, that the Queen might be carried over upon their backs to a new site for a nest, and some of them were pressed by the weight of her so low in the water that they drowned, and all without a sound. Does this not argue for a consciousness of the Greater Good, even of the need for self-sacrifice and thus for a soul – be it ever so small?’

‘Or else, as has been said many times,’ said Louise, ‘it is mere
instinct
, as that which drives them to forage and to copulate. But we shall never know.’