So we did this mutual side shuffle, feinting and parrying like swordsmen, like men before mirrors. I would have bowed if he’d given me a chance, displayed nape like a white flag, bobbed and bowed, ducked and dithered. Why not? It costs nothing to give way to squires, even when they’re coming out servants’ entrances, and it pleases them so.
“Stand still, damn ye,” the old fellow said.
And I did, recovering my balance like a tumbler. He looked me over, asked my name.
“It’s George,” I said.
“George,” he mocked.
“Aye,” I said. Then, haughtily, as he’d been scornfuclass="underline" “George, son of George. Son of George, son of George, son of George. George, son of George to the forty-second or forty-third power if it comes to that.”
“And does it come to that?”
“It sure does.”
“British?”
“As the day is long.”
“Bow to the King,” hissed the aging dandy.
“What? Where? Here?” Startled, reflexive, bent as in cramp. Taking, before him, a kind of cover, as if shells had gone off, rockets, explosives, sunbursts of majesty. (A Mills first, an historical highlight, whose eight and a half centuries had been a kind of preparation for just such a moment. The subject is subjects. The subject is subjects! Who’d lived always in monarchical climes the low-liege life. Assured of kings as a Christian of God but who’d yet to see one. Never mind been in one’s presence, had actual audience. Glimpsed his coach I mean, spotted retainers. Living centuries on a small island since practically the invention of kings, ringed by their circumstance and circumscribed by their ordinance, hemmed by decree, paying the rates and loyal at the levy, doing the death duties and making good on the ransoms, prizing the special commemorative coins and celebratory postage like heirloom, and coming up with the surtaxes and VAT’s, the excise and octroi, all tolls all told and the taxes on war and peace and all the royal expeditions. Excused from nothing yet and exacting from ourselves what they’d tax collectors to exact. Among the poorest of their subjects and withal over the years and down through the reigns and dynasties — how we told time — contributing to their collective, cumulative well-being at least one gold spoke on at least one golden wheel that turned the coach we had yet to see.) I grabbed the sleeve of the old guy’s coat and yanked.
“Get down, Guv! Get down for the sovereign!”
And, groveled as spider, did this dance of good citizenship. Palace farce. For the handkerchief that came off in my hand when I’d grabbed his wrist was embroidered with a silken seal of majesty, his royal monogram in king’s tailored cursive, HMGIV like Roman numerals of state. By this time, too, recognizing elements of the declined, devalued handsomeness in the aging face from the mint, intact perfection of his image on my coins. (Thinking: Not merely a man, not merely even an important man, but actual animate money.)
We aren’t stupid. It was so unexpected. Indeed, I got the picture before the King did, and made my adjustments, all my Kentucky windage reassignments of perception, the King himself still preoccupied with a king’s terrors — mutiny, red menace, rout and regicide. It was my duty to calm him.
Practically prostrate, I called soothingly to him. “Sire,” I crooned. Calling him autarch, calling him dynast, calling him King, my mind all over him with all the stored-up honorifics of a captive race.
“Guv?” he said. “Guv?”
“A figure of speech, Father.”
“To the forty-third power?”
“Or forty-second. More likely forty-second. Almost assuredly forty-second.”
“Gee,” he said wistfully, “we’re only George the Fourth. Great Great Grandfather wasn’t born till 1660.”
No. It was my duty to comfort him. And still obeisant, my body language spelling Kick Me, I proceeded to betray a couple dozen generations just like that, appropriating his figures, confiscating for my low use his own long, lazy, highborn inherited primogenitive courtship patterns — their kings’ prerogatives of annulment and divorce, eschewing girl children, all the extended foreplay and monkeyshine monarchics that come with reign, their fiat history and command performance arrangements — thereby appending years to, and actually doubling, our own regulation Mills-size generations. But for all my extemporized mathematics I could only squeeze us to the twenty-second or so power, a figure unacceptable to the parvenu Hanoverian. (Do I sound too larky? Wait. Have patience. I get mine.)
“You’re some upstart pretender, ain’t you?” His Majesty said.
“No, sir. I swear it.”
“Yes you are. You’re one of those wicked, wretched claimants.”
“Me? In these rags?”
“A clever disguise.”
“I’m your loyalest subject.”
“My closest follower?” the King asked slyly.
“Sir?”
“Come come, you’re not stupid. You’re a spy.”
“I never am,” I told him forcefully. But you don’t disagree with a king, and added, “Your Royal Highness.”
“Oh yes,” he said disconsolately. “Our Royal Highness indeed. Our Real Whoreness. Our Rogue Whoness.”
“I may not listen to treason, sire.”
“Treason,” the King said miserably.
“Who disparages my king treasons my country.”
Then, changing his mood once again: “How did you find the safe house?”
“The safe—?”
“Whom did you bribe? The neighbors, was it?”
“Sir, I don’t even know the neighbors.” And I looked around. We were standing in the kitchen. Or what would have been the kitchen if there’d been a stove, cooking implements, even a kitchen table. It was without furnishings. Through the open door at the back of the room I could glimpse other vacant rooms. “Would this be your castle then?” I asked, trying to keep the misgivings and nervousness out of my voice, for the place I’d seen from the outside was barely larger than the croft cottages at home, and I’d begun to suspicion that the gentleman was some mad imposter. George IV, or whoever he was, studied me a moment.
“Restored,” he said. “What do you think? Not too busy?”
“Sir, I don’t think so.”
“We’re so pleased.”
Well we’re not stupid. And of course I knew that it wasn’t Buckingham House and that the King — if he was the King, for by this time I had more than doubts — was bantering with me, but how do you banter with royalty, or with madmen either, if that’s what it came to? I haven’t the gift of humoring people. (Or of hiding motives either, wearing my interiority on my sleeve like kings their handkerchiefs. I had actually taken a penny out of my purse and was glancing from it to the “king” as a man might check a map against the very landscape he stands in.) And now the man who claimed to be George IV had drawn a pistol and was pointing it at me. I could see that the handle was encrusted with jewels that formed the same same seal I’d seen on his kerchief.