Until I have finished and despatched my apology to Celia, I do not wish to be seen by her, so I do not stir from my room, eating my meals off a tray, like a convalescent. I thus have no idea what is occurring in my house – whether my servants are wearing their fur tabards as instructed (Will Gates is not), whether the portrait is nearing its consummation (in the rendering of a Scottish glen, perhaps, bathed in sunlight behind Celia's fair head?), whether Finn has informed upon me to the King. I sense myself to be in danger, but cannot determine from whence it will come. The visage of Nell the witch returns very often to my mind. The welts on my shoulders are slow to heal.

Today, Will brings me a letter. But this is no Royal summons. It is a poor illiterate note, written by one calling himself Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman. The handwriting is so vile and shuddering, it gives the appearance of having been written at sea in a Hebridean gale. The tidings it relates, when at last I am able to decipher it, are dramatic. This is what is says:

Most Kind and honourable Sir,

I write upon request of the widow Pierpoint, who has not the gift of any alphabet.

She begs me to inform you how that her husband, George Pierpoint, Bargeman, was drowned this Wednesday last under London Bridge while leaning from his boat to catch a haddock and falls into the boil about the stanchions and is gone down, lost.

She requires me to say to you she knows you to be a Person of Kindness. She begs you to remember that she must buy coal for her irons and her washing cauldrons or else come to a poor end which may be the Workhouse.

In sum she requests me to ask of you the gift of thirty shillings, in consideration whereof she blesses you and declares you to be a most Proper and Charitable Man.

From A Humble Servant of the Nation,

Septimus Frame, Merchant Seaman.

So Pierpoint is drowned! The wise river will hear no more of his knavery and cheating and foul language, but has taken him to her deep. And Rosie eats her little suppers of bread and whelks alone…

I feel momentarily cheered by news of this death. I imagine for a moment the jumping haddock slipping through Pierpoint's rough hands and, as he falls, his barge going away on the current. Aloud I whisper, "There was no Overseer," but cannot determine precisely what I mean by this. All I know is that I have no feeling of pity for Pierpoint: I am glad his life has ceased.

In times other than these, it would have been my first thought, upon receiving such a letter, to make my way speedily to London, to press into Rosie's hot hand the money requested and cheerfully usurp her husband's place in her bed for a number of rumpled nights. As matters stand, however, I feel too ill, contrite, confused, lovesick and afraid to stir out of the house. I am shipwrecked here with my passion. In the distance, I can easily imagine I hear guns of a great Man-of-War. I must go to work again upon my apology…

Now, I perceive why I cannot write it. I cannot write it because it must end with a promise I cannot make. I construct the sentence: "On my honour, I vouchsafe never again, as long as you do not wish it, to touch you or impose upon you declarations of feelings I know you to find most loathsome," but I know, even as I write, that I will not be true to this. I know that, such is my nature, it will on some future occasion explode with the very words my wife does not wish to hear. I sense the stuff of this explosion already gathering about my heart, like pus. Does an unrequited love, in time, make a corpse of the lover? Shall I see the drowned Pierpoint before I ever lie with my own wife? (How much I despise my own self-pity.)

Sweet Rosie, I write, knowing she cannot read, but desperate at last to speak my thoughts to a friend. I shall send, with this collection of Merivel's ramblings, a Japanese purse containing thirty shillings. The purse itself has some value and is yours to keep or sell as you will.

I am sorry for the drowning of Pierpoint. To die for a mere haddock is most lamentable.

I would journey to London to console you for the loss of a husband except that I appear to have tumbled into a very profound melancholy and unease of body and mind so that I find myself unable to move from my room. Where I stay wrapped in badgers' pelts staring at a grey and solid sky. In short, I am not Merivel, but a mopish phlegmatic and futile person I do not like at all. My old self, though most outlandish, was amusing company. This new man is loathsome. I have asked him to leave and never more return, but there he sits, scratching, fidgeting, blowing his nose, sighing,yawning and doing a little paltry writing. I wish he would get into his grave.

This person – whom I shall rechristen Fogg – recently had a dream of the King, in which His Majesty asked him: What is the First Rule of the Cosmos? Fogg, in his solitude, finds his mind tormented by this question. It adheres to his thinking like a mussel to rock and yet cannot be prised open. Last night, however, on hearing of the dying of Pierpoint, it began to yield a little to his probing. Thus, Fogg set this down as a probability; that the First Rule of the Cosmos is the Separateness of All Things. As each planet and star is entire of itself and not joined to any other planet or star, so must every person upon earth remain separate and alone, even in death. Thus in impenetrable solitude did Pierpoint die.

But whereas the planets are serene in their separateness, knowing any collision with one another likely to destroy them and return them to dust, Fogg remarks that he, along with very many of his race, finds his Separateness the most entirely sad fact of his existence and is every moment hopeful of colliding with someone who will obscure it from his mind. Yet what he now perceives is the folly of such a collision. Collision is fatal because it transgresses the First Rule. In collision, Fogg is split apart. In collision, he turns to jealous gas, to heartless dust…

At this inconclusive (and somewhat incoherent) point, my scribbles to Rosie were interrupted. Will Gates came up to my room and informed me that Mister de Gourlay had arrived and urgently requested to see me.

"Look at me, Will," I said. "I can see no one until I am well again."

"He asks me to tell you that he has brought with him something to make you well."

"Ah," I said, "the blood of swallows, perhaps."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"I would prefer to remain alone, Will. I have much to think about."

"He is very pressing, Sir."

"There's the reason he is not popular. He has not grasped that life is a quadrille, necessitating backward as well as forward pas."

Upon saying this, I immediately reflected that my apology to Celia was one such backward pas, without which I would not be able to resume any dance whatsoever, unless perhaps a Dance of Death. Thus, while Will was further pressing Dégeulasse's suit, I quickly laid aside my letter (if such it was) to Rosie Pierpoint, took up a clean sheet of vellum and wrote the following simple message:

Fair Celia,

I am mightily sorry for my foul behaviour. I beg you to forgive me this transgression, that I may remain your friend and loyal protector.

R.M.

I then instructed Will to bring Dégeulasse to my room and, having done so, to deliver my short note to Celia.

I put on my wig. The anxiety within me had lessened by a small measure, seeming to cause a sudden drop in the temperature of my blood. Whereas I had been boiling and burning, I now felt chill. I reached for my tabard and put it on and sat with my arms tucked under its apron. What, I wished to enquire, as I waited for my guest, had happened to my painting of Russians? Was it ever begun anywhere but in my mind?