Free Restoration by Rose Tremain

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