Free Restoration by Rose Tremain Page A

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."
    "They had no sins, Pearce," I reply. "They attended two sermons on a Sunday. They said their prayers morning and night, kneeling by the bed from which neither of them ever strayed. But look at me! I am boiling with lust, immoderate in my consumption of wine, irreverent in my speech and a self-deceiver. Why did the fire not consume me? Why is suffering so arbitrary? No, Pearce, it will not do. If God exists, He is surely cruel. He is the old and terrible God of Moses, the God of Abraham. But the most logical conclusion is that He does not exist at all."
    It is interesting to note the ease with which I had let my faith fall from me. Any love I had hitherto felt for God, I had given to the King, who had reciprocated (not as God had done, by speaking through the mouths of fat bishops and having frequent recourse to long periods of enigmatic silence) by laughing at my jokes and giving me royal kisses far sweeter to me than any embrace I'd had from any woman. It was the absence of these tender expressions of friendship and affection that had plunged me into such despair and sent me scrabbling about in the darkness once more, in search of my lost Redeemer, however cruel He might turn out to be.
    This search of mine, these glow-worm prayers I sent out into the starry sky above Meg Storey's roof, if they failed to bring God back to comfort me, did, after a few weeks, send me my old friend, Pearce, who arrived at Bidnold on a mule. Strapped to the mule's back, were Pearce's pitiful worldly possessions (referred to by me, rather wittily, I think, as his "burning coals", in reference to a mad Quaker at Westminster who had wandered about calling the fops to repentance with a dish of the said coals balanced on his head). What Pearce owned, in fact, was the following: three Bibles, one copy of his beloved Harvey's De Generatione Animalium , various other anatomical tracts, including works by Vesalius and da Vinci and Needham's Disquisitio Anatomica De Formato Foetu , some quill pens, a black coat and hat, two pairs of black breeches, some torn shirts and stockings, a box of rusty surgical instruments, a single pewter mug and plate and a china soup ladle made in Lancashire. This ladle was the only legacy of his mother, who had died in poverty to send