George Mills (54 page)

I closed my eyes. “Oh, I hope you
are
the King, Your Highness,” I told him. “I hope you outrank everyone on this island. All the islands, all the continents, all the world. I hope this murder is sanctioned by divine right and ain’t just the heatless, heartless, whimwham of just some anybody brokeheart bedlamite.”

“You don’t acknowledge the Hanoverian legitimacy! You, you——”

Of course it was possible that he was George IV and crazy too. There was plenty of precedent on the books. The rumors about his father, for example.

“I’m a Mills. If you’re George Hanover I’m your subject. None loyaler. I’ve pledged allegiances. I’ve sworn oaths.”

“Commoners don’t swear oaths.”

“Millses do.”

“They’re not required.”

“Millses require them.”

And that’s when I told him some of our history, the long story I’d been memorizing and then rehearsing all my life. Since I’d first heard it. Bringing in details about my life I hadn’t memorized only because no one had ever related them to me, and hadn’t known I’d been rehearsing only because I thought of nothing else. Who was only eighteen years old and without a son and so had no one to tell it to but a king in his sixties. Not the whole story of course, only an overview, the themes and highlights, the way my father had introduced it to me.

“Oh, oaths,” he said dismissively when I’d finished. “All fealty’s faked submission holds. I know all about that. Why God limbered the neck and hinged the knee. You think kings care for your crawled compliance and cross-my-hearts? Or put much stock in dubious duty’s danced obedience?

“We were Prince of Wales,” he said. “Then Prince Regent. Ceremonially sworn ourselves, hands on Bibles, hands on hearts. On state occasions to Father cried ‘God save the King!’ when all we meant was ‘Happy birthday.’ Zeal just informed politics lying low. Lying.

“Come come, George the Forty-third——”

“Twenty-second.”

“Indeed,” he said shrewdly, “Twenty-second. Using our king’s packed calibrations, statecraft’s Celsius metrics. Come come, George. (See? I speak to you as George to George and put away my pistol. I couldn’t use it anyway.) Come come then. What is it you want? Why do you lie in wait for me at my safe house?” Then his face darkened and I knew he was the King. Not his resemblance to the face on my penny nor his expensive accessories, nor even his strange manner of speech, but the suffusion itself, the royal blood heavy as sap with mood. “You’ve come from Brighton! You’re a reveler! Something’s happened to Maria!”

“Maria?”

“Mrs. Fitzherbert,” he said.

“Mrs. Fitzherb——”

And suddenly his hands were at his throat as if he meant to do himself an injury. Pulling clumsily at his neck scarf—he was King all right, valet-tended, no more familiar with the loops and intricacies of his complicated adornments than a babe in a nursery—unwinding, it seemed, bolts of the stuff, twirling it away from him like noose, like lariat, a dark silk spiral that rose over his face and head like black smoke. A huge diamond fastener rolled on the floor against his shoe. He kicked it furiously away from him. And now his hands were at his collar tearing at the precious cloth, murderously ripping it, and I thought: Why, he’s choking, the King of Great Britain, Hanover and Ireland is choking, and rushed to his side, though I didn’t know what to do, or no, knew well enough what to do but was reluctant to do it, too timid to pound the back of a king—even a king in extremis—as if he were just some pal in a tavern. So I stood there gawking, gawky, close up as some morbid witness, and could only moan over and over like an idiot, “God save the King,
God
save the King!”

And now, having stripped himself of cravat and torn his shirt, his hands tightened about folds of actual skin, working his neck as if he meant to strangle himself, me still incapable of interfering with him and able only to mutter my mad “God save the King’s,” and then, in crazy desperation, suddenly recalling
his
words. Leaning even further forward, my lips almost in his ear. “Happy birthday,” I prompted, “happy birthday, George IV.”

“Help,” he gasped. “Help us for God’s sake. We can’t
get
the damned thing.” It was that “us” and “we” that got me. A king bent on wringing his own neck and still mindful of the royal grammar, his brain still locked on the King’s English, his sovereign’s syntax. That was when the loyalest subject in the land raised his hands against his king, the two of us co-conspirators in his regicide. I placed my strong young hands over his fat old weak ones, as yet adding no additional pressure of my own, intending only to encourage him in his efforts, a new form, a sort of King’s touch in reverse. Touching the King. He stared up at me with a wild eye and squawked through the muffling medium of our two pairs of hands, our twenty tight-knit fingers. “Are you——are you trying to kill us? Take your hands
off
me—
us
—you——you
Stuart!”

My hands dropped to my sides and His Majesty rubbed his neck, which by this time was quite red. Then he asked if I would get the clasp. He was referring to a fine gold chain which hung around his neck and from which a locket was suspended. I raised my hands but when he saw them he seemed to change his mind again and, waiting till he was calmer, managed to undo it himself. Before he handed it over to me he pressed a button at its top and the locket sprang open.

“There,” he said. “That’s Maria——Mrs. Fitzherbert.”

The locket contained a miniature of a beautiful young girl. “This child is married?” I asked.

“What? Oh. Well. She was younger when the portrait was made. She’s close to seventy now,” he said. “Then you
don’t
know her, do you?” I shrugged and returned the King’s necklace. “You’re not come from Brighton. You’re not in costume. You’re not from the revels,” he said, disappointed.

“These are my clothes, Majesty,” I said, and was reminded of the tapestry condition that Greatest Grandfather Mills had spoken of to Mills’s horse centuries before in the salt mine.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course they are.”

“We dress this way.”

“Yes.”

“For the mowing.”

“Oh yes.”

“For the tilling and toiling.”

“Yes, yes.”

“For the rubers and turnips.”

“Yes,” he said, “we know.”

“For the cabbage and kale.”

“Naturally.”

“For the beans and the beetroots.” (Because I couldn’t stop.)

“Certainly.”

“For reaching the fruits, their ripe rife rums and boozy brandies.”

“All right,” the King said.

“Never for revels.”

“No,” he said.

Because I couldn’t stop, you see. Or not couldn’t, wouldn’t. Who had never had audience. Not in forty-two or forty-three generations. Say forty-three. (Almost certainly forty-three. Forty-three absolutely.) Who’ve these passive, heirloom hearts you see, handed down father-to-son, father-to-son, father-to-son
ad infinitum,
who not only had sat out each riot, rebellion and revolt, every mutiny and coup d’etat from Wat Tyler’s defeated heroics to the fizzled Gunpowder Plot, but who’d never even signed a neighbor’s petition or written a letter to the editor. Who
couldn’t
stop, you see. Who might have in a palace or stately home, but not here in this unfurnished croft cottage of a “safe house”—who still didn’t understand the term but took it to mean something gay, something spoofy and nostalgic, with carefully blended choruses of pretend peasants holding flower baskets and singing opera—with its rude, spic-and-span meagerness.

“Never for fêtes, never for galas.”

“No, of course not.”

“Not for affairs, not for occasions.”

“I see.”

“We dress
up.
”

“We understand,” he said. “We do.”

“We break out the cambric, we let loose the lace.”

“If you’re finished?” the King said.

“What picks up stains.”

“Quite.”

“What blemishes easy, what soils in the air.” And stopped now. Not because I had gone too far, or even far enough, but because grievance made me breathless, took my wind away I mean. Seeing how easy it was, how even someone like myself, who’d seen no kings but only heard of them, gone all logy with my ancient, sluggish heritage and languid beefs, had only to wait—whether he wanted to or not, whether he was interested or not—to float in his patience, treading it like shallow water, and one day not opportunity but accident itself would knock. Not chance, not even time laying about and lining things up——accident, bad odds, the pot-luck of doom and fate. And what made me breathless was that I perceived that all that differentiated me from the king killers and historical tuckpointers was inclination.

King George IV did not perceive this.

King George IV wanted me calmer, to talk me down from my resentment.

“I suppose you’re pious?” he said.

“Pious?”

“Religious.”

“No, not really.”

“Civic-minded then.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m civic-minded.”

“French things? Social contracts, the Rights of Man?”

“I’m English. I don’t take with wog ways.”

“No,” the Hanoverian said suspiciously. And explained to his subject what a safe house was.

I wasn’t far off.

What King George IV told George XLIII:

“Kings aren’t born. They’re made. In the sense that contingency heirs thrones. The first-born could be an idiot; an inopportune girl; someone too sickly for the times; at odds with the ministers, current events, the Cabinet——All manner of things can come between an apparency and a crown.

“But consider a prince. Assume what he assumes. That all will go well. That one day the King will die and, in the nature of things, he will be King.

“Now. There are only two sorts of kings. The battlers and the good time Charlies. You could look it up, but we assure you that history bears us out. (Shall we sit on the floor? Standing winds us.—There. Thank you, George. Oh, that’s much better. Much.)

“Of course the battlers have practically disappeared from the thrones they used to sit on like so many saddles. I mean the warrior kings, the conquerors—Bonaparte, of course, but he was no proper king; more to the point he was never a prince—the horseback heroes, all that pup tent royalty with their iron-assed, cavalry sensibilities and real estate hearts. I don’t mock them. I don’t. They made the world, its true cartographers, and did all this not from Heaven but from ambush. On maneuvers, campaigns, sieges, blockades. On scorched earth in the dead of winter. With billets for palace and trenches for fort. With rations for banquets and their kingdom front lines. So I don’t mock them. I don’t. But if they made the world, they broke it too. Surely the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse was a king.

“Well—battlers are chiefly dead now. The chiefly dead. And they fell not necessarily in the wars they lost but rather in the wars they won. Dead of politics and delegation and the piecemeal amelioration of the world. The battlers are dead, long live the good time Charlies!

“Princes I mean. Those ritual babes, those ceremonial children. In their toy tailoring, their plaything regalia. Up on their ponies, pulled in their dog carts. Taking trays in their bedrooms, their lunches from hampers on summer’s golden bivouacs. Outranking their music and dancing masters. Calling the tune. Outranking
all
their masters. Outranking, for that matter, the King himself who, for all his now ornamental power, his own now baubled governance and ascendancy, owed no greater obligation to his so-called kingdom than simple, subservient fatherhood. Who could chastise and even discipline—my father once shot the dog who pulled my cart—but could never repudiate, never disown. (Who could in effect, Mills, write no will, all that having been done for him by the very principles of succession that the battlers had battled for. Who would die, as it were, intestate as the lowest pauper in the land. And incidentally, George XLIII, did you enter this into your equations when you so rapidly calculated the twenty-year differential between a king’s generation and a commoner’s? It was because kings knew—they’d been princes themselves, remember—how much harder it would go with them once their children were born, how their already depleted authority would be even further adulterated by their coddled kin. It could have been some vaguely flickering memory of the look on a prince’s father’s face—I can still recall the foiled temper on my own father’s face when he shot the dog that pulled me about the royal park—his watered anger, his niggled rage. We battle passion, we good time Charlies, by fathering bastards.)

“We had it made. Princes, princes did. And lived with impunity like favored pets. It was sybaritic but don’t say no good ever came of it. There are always spin-offs, Mills. They trickle down. Sooner or later they do, they trickle down. Why, education,
education
was invented for us! Toys, lad, toys and gewgaws! Cakes and cookies, chocolates and collections! The most important artisans and cooks and engravers doing their best to keep us entertained. Great inventors pressed us to accept their original working models. (The first candle, the first candle was made for a seven-year-old Italian prince because he was afraid of the wall torches that flared in his nursery!) Those were the glory days, Mills. Those were the glory days, kid. We had this privately engraved stamp collection. (I would have been fourteen or fifteen by then.) Young Bill Blake was awarded the commission. (Hogarth was dead, and anyway I’d never really liked the wallpaper he sketched for my nursery.) He did this absolutely top-hole job, wizard work, wizard. A personalized postage on which our head was represented as the Crown Prince of three or four dozen imaginary kingdoms. Will I ever forget the New Jerusalem ha’penny? Coins were similarly minted for us and with them I purchased great pleasure of some of the most beautiful women in England and the Continent. Will I ever forget those ladies, most of them courtesans, cousins, dowager princesses——all of them older?

“Because even at nine and eleven and thirteen I was still wet-nursing. I couldn’t give up the tit. I’ve
never
given it up. (Enemies whisper it’s why I’m so fat and that could be the case. Science may side with their slanders. I’ve too well known the nipple’s weighty nourishment, the breast’s milky syrups, its rich creams and thick butters. All its queer cheeses, its chest junkets and bust custards. We’re addicted to tit. We love the
taste
we mean.) Though we’d never drawn Charlotte Sophia’s, our mother’s, milk. But this ain’t a mother thing, we think, only obsessive thirst annihilating itself at the very wellhead of lixiviate, suffocate whelm.