I note that when I first set down my Story, I speculated that there may have been more than one Beginning to it. I suggested indeed Five Beginnings. For I understood then that no life begins only when it begins, but has many additional inceptions, and each of these determines the course of what is to come.
And now I see with equal clarity that a man's life may have more than one Ending. But alas, the endings I may have earned present themselves to me, each and every one, in a sombre light. If there are five, as there were Five Beginnings, then these must surely be they.
An Ending through loneliness...
An Ending through Poverty...
An Ending through Poisoning...
An Ending from Suicide...
An Ending through Meaninglessness. This, I think, is the prospective ending that most dismays me. Despite a most almighty Struggle with God and my Vocation, endeavouring always (as once exhorted by the King) to discover my own Usefullness and Purpose, I arrive very frequently at the suspicion that my life is a trifling thing, ill-lived, full of Misjudgement, Indulgence and Sloth, leading me only deeper and deeper into an abyss of Confusion and Emptiness, in which I no loner recall why I am alive. And a man who has lost this particular recall must surely be destined soon to Ultimate Oblivion.
Today, Margaret is returning to Bidnold.
...
He managed to lift himself up a little. But when he looked up at me his gaze was all bewildered, and then, on a sudden, as I had him sitting up, he gave a great Shout, which sounded almost like a clap of laughter. And there was such a wild and vibrant Echo to the Shout that I seemed to hear it carried out of my window into the air and fly westwards along the river, past the boats crowded at Southwark Steps, past the commerce milling at Black Friars' past the gates of the Temple, and sounding on and on and on above the water, until at Whitehall it faded and was heard no more.
And he was gone in that instant of the Shout. It was his last sound on earth.
I closed his eyes and laid my head next to his, and held him to me and wept. The steam from the boiling Coppers shrouded us and made all the air around us white.
I could ardently have wished that he had not passed away so sprawled as he was upon a heap of dirty Laundry, but there I could do nothing. The World is as it chooses to be and he was one who knew it well.
from Merivel: a Man of his Time by Rose Tremain, chapter 2 and epilogue
