"Yes. You're undoubtedly right. It is a grievous mistake. And yet to me, you see, it's a rather memorable rendering of all that I feel about the colours of my park. Which only illustrates, does it not, that feeling, however passionate a spur it may be to the poor dabbling painter, is, without technique, an impotent and ridiculous thing, like a eunuch in love, one might fancifully suggest."
I laughed, but Finn did not even smile. I felt light-hearted, despite his loathing of my work, and sorry for him that his spirit seemed so grave.
"Well," I said, "let's forget the picture. I shall put it on the fire presently. Will you take a glass of wine, Finn, to restore your lightness of heart?"
Poor Robin agreed and we returned to the house, where I ordered some cool white wine to be brought from my cellar to the Morning Room.
Finn gulped his drink like a parched traveler. His hand shook. Almost before he had sat down, he leapt to his feet again and announced to me that he had taken good heed of my advice on how to get on in what he called "this heartless age" and had therefore spent a great deal of money and time preparing a gift for me, in the hopes that now, at last, I would speak of his talents to the King.
"Excellent, Finn!" I said. "You're learning fast. Would that you could say the same of my painting, what?"
A little nervous smile crossed his angelic mouth. Then he darted out and returned a few seconds later, carrying in his arms a large cylindrical object covered in a pretty embroidered cloth, which he laid carefully at my feet.
"What is it, Finn?" I asked, fearing suddenly that he had brought me the kind of truncated piece of Corinthian column he was so fond of dotting about in his own pictures. But he wouldn't answer, only looked from me to the object and back to me again, like a timorous fieldmouse looking for danger as it spies some split grains of wheat.
I removed the cloth. Before me stood a birdcage of great delicacy, painted a deep Prussian blue and gilded with gold leaf. Inside it, on a swing perch, was a bird, which at first I took to be a stuffed thing, so still and staring did it remain. Then it turned its yellow eye on me and opened its beak and let out a sweet trill. "My word, Finn," I said, "it's alive!"
Finn nodded. "It's an Indian Nightingale," he announced proudly. "It has traveled the seas."
I will at once confess that I was delighted with this gift. Seldom, I thought, can more pains have been taken over a bribe. The cage was an object of wistful beauty, like something from a departed time. The bird inside was ordinary in its appearance, with a sleek blue-black body and an orange beak. Its song, however, was a pure and brilliant sound, a sound I seemed to have heard in my mind, but could not recall in nature.
"They say," said Finn, "that it may be taught other notes, even tunes, if you play a wind instrument to it, particularly the oboe."
"How astonishing," I said. "Why particularly the oboe?"
"The oboe, I believe, is within its register."
"Ah."
"But you do not play?"
"No. But I will learn. I could, I think, acquire a strong appetite for music."
Across Finn's countenance darted a momentary flicker of fear. I knew what he was thinking and his little discomfort amused me, but I chose not to comment upon it and we sat for a few moments in silence, both staring at the Indian Nightingale.
"So," said Finn at last. "When you are next at Court…"
"Your gift is very fine. Thank you."
"When you are next with the King…"
"Hush, Finn," I said, "for I am quite unable to raise your hopes over your own matter. The King at the moment is very burdened down with affairs of State and I must bide my time until the more frivolous side of his nature turns again to me."
"I understand."
"Timing is all. And it may be that we must wait out the winter."
"The winter?" said Finn with dismay. "But I will starve, Sir Robert. I will die of cold and chilblains."
"You must believe me," I said, "no one thirsts for the return of His Majesty's gaiety and laughter more than I. But until such time, I can promise you that he will take no more painters, oboists, tennis coaches or other riff-raff into his service…"
By my inadvertent inclusion of the word "riff-raff", Finn looked utterly downcast. I was about to explain that, as the son of a glovemaker, failed anatomist and failed physician, I included myself in that category of people. We are all, I nearly said, so much chaff, so many airy feathers, blown by wind, burned and suffocated by fire, but I refrained, preferring to conceal from Finn, in case he might one day teach me how to paint something of worth, my modest lineage, my failures in medicine and my deterministic pessimism which could so cruelly cross the grain of his own faith. I contented myself with slapping Finn's green-hosed knee and saying boisterously: "Don't sulk, old Finn. No one could say for certain that you won't be in Whitehall by Christmas."
After several weeks had passed and I had no word from the King, I began to recognise that, while my letter to him had momentarily relieved my anxiety, the sending of it had now thrown me into a worse distress than ever. For before I had sent it I had been able to convince myself that the King's thoughts might turn to me again at any moment, that his mind had, in fact, mislaid me for a while, but that he would rediscover me during, perhaps, a game of ninepins or in the course of some immodest banquet. Now, on the other hand, I could only interpret his silence as a deliberate act of forgetting. Not even the death of Minette had moved him sufficiently to write to me. This in itself was proof enough that he no longer regarded me with any of his former affection and that I was, from his radiant inner circle, now cast into outer darkness.
The profundity and Stygian gloom of this darkness oppressed me most fearfully during the hours of the actual night, so that I began to keep a candle by my bed, or, better than this, to flee my house entirely and spend my nights in Meg Storey's garret in the roof of the Jovial Rushcutters, keeping sleep at bay with ale and rowdy couplings and foolish stories about my travels in the Land of the River Mar, a country of my imaginings, located in Meg's ignorant head as "just above Africa" and about which I invented the most absorbing lies. "The preferred element of the natives of the River Mar," I told her, "is water. And this is how they sleep, with their bodies immersed in the river. And all along the banks of the Mar, hanging from the mangrove trees, are loops made out of hide, to hold the sleeping heads out of the water, so that they do not drown." Meg would sigh with wonder at such unimaginable things and threaten to drift to sleep, lulled by my voice, while outside I would hear poor Danseuse paw the frosty ground and whinny with cold.
Though the solace afforded me by Meg Storey's plump and energetic body was considerable, I felt urgently in need of some spiritual comfort, and began, at about this time, to send out messages to God. I imagined these feeble communications as minute blips of light, little wriggling glow-worms which, unless God had a telescope pointed directly at them, he would be unlikely to notice. The days when God and I engaged in daily conversation had long since passed away. They passed away at the time of the fire, which, as surely as it consumed the bodies of my poor parents, together with the ribbons and feathers that were the stuff of their innocent trade, had also burned up what remained of my faith. I had found, since my rejection of Galen's theory of divine perfection, that anatomy had begun to lead me away from God. My comparative study of the uterus bovinae and the uterus hutnani had shown me that the generative process of the cow is so similar to that of the woman as to make me wonder whether there is not some essential thread connecting us to the animal kingdom and thus toppling us from the pillars of divinity upon which, not merely kings and rulers have set themselves, but upon which the vilest rogue and murderer believes himself to stand. These heretical thoughts I had kept to myself of course, but when I saw how swiftly, how cruelly my good parents died, how, without the least sign of God's lamentation, their lungs burst and their flesh burnt up like meat, I felt compelled to cease my own conversing with an omnipotent and benevolent God. For surely, He is neither? If He is benevolent, why did He send such terrible destruction on such honest and hard-working people? And if He is omnipotent, why did He not prevent it? "Ah," Pearce, would say, "but suffering redeems, Merivel. In their agony, the sins of your parents passed from them."