“It was how I met Maria.
“This would have been forty-one years ago. I would have been twenty-two, Maria six years older. And it would have been at a ball, and I would have been strolling down the formal presentation line, barely glancing at the men’s bowed kowtows and carefully observing the revealing curtsies of the women. Examining, I mean. Holding their hands and by a subtle pressure of my own keeping them down, availing myself of stunning vistas of bosom, controlling honor’s duration and causing those ladies to heat and blush as surely as if I had kindled their dry white flesh with the oxygens of my gloves. Although some never took color at all, their breasts pale as lime, fixed as paint or whitewash. (Or as if, I thought when I detected among them some recent mother, all the blood in the world could neither stain nor stanch the tide of such milk. I was neither prospecting for virgins nor inspecting for trollops, these little litmus tests of mine not so much science as interested, even-handed, even innocent forays into Nature, as a man might engage to witness sunsets, say.)
“Maria was the most charmingly endowed woman I had ever seen. But she was no flusher.
“If she had been I might not have ventured — though I may have, covered as a bed by my prince’s privilege and anything-goes protocol and all my good time Charlie dispensations — to have offered my proposal.
“ ‘Would you,’ I whispered, still on that inverted receiving line which was my style and preference and down which I ambled as if I were the only invited guest in some stuffed tenement of princes and princesses, ‘be my wet nurse? I will give you Tom Gainsborough’s Blue Boy.’
“ ‘Sir, I have no milk.’
“ ‘My mistress then. I will give you a house in Brighton and five thousand a year.’
“ ‘Sir, I have a husband.’
“ ‘Two thousand for the husband. Could even a king say fairer?’
“ ‘Sir, I cannot.’
“ ‘Madam, I’m a generous prince.’
“ ‘Sir, I’m a virtuous woman.’
“ ‘You did not redden.’
“ ‘Redden?’
“ ‘When I leered your breasts, when I squinnied your nipples. When I leisurely look-see’d and gave them the once-over and the glad eye. You did not redden, madam! You did not plum or peach! I might for rise have well as ogled the stitch of your frock!’
“ ‘Then, sir, might I have glowed indeed for it is the very principle of propriety, if not of virtue itself, that the scrutiny of one’s fashion in high company can betoken only the awry and amiss. I would, in such a circumstance, have warmed under the gaze of a tailor or the glance of a seamstress.’
“ ‘I am no tailor, madam. I am no seamstress. I’m Prince of Wales and I attentioned your tits. You did not redden!’
“ ‘Then, sir, I am no scarlet woman,’ Mrs. Fitzherbert told me softly.
“This was still on the line, still ceremonial. That the others who had yet to be presented had entirely ceased the customary buzz they do even at Court, even in the presence of the King himself, let alone a mere Prince of Wales who wouldn’t be Regent for another twenty-seven years or King for another thirty-six, ought perhaps to have given us pause or made one or the other of us a bit more cautious. Indeed, I suppose that at this point I should have smiled at Mrs. Fitzherbert’s clever grace note, clicked what I had for heels, bowed, and gone on to the next person waiting to be presented. Or, rather, I suppose it’s what you suppose. But the splendour of our arrangements, their true civility and grandeur, is actually quite opposite. Court must, simply must, have its gossip, its exclusionary spice. Well, do you understand, Mills, that gossip and rumor are always more or less horizontal, that, like certain species of fish, they swim only their customary strata and rarely attempt the antipathetical depths? Now, it ain’t in Newton, but it’s true as physics that in fixed societies like our own, nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin. It’s why we have to spy on you people. It’s why you’re cordoned off on state occasions; it’s why there’s crowd control, squeeze play, spurs on horsemen; cosh, curb and roped-off street — all rule’s royal leash law, all order’s rerouted traffic, all rank’s union shop. It ain’t assassination we fear, the villain’s and madman’s bullet at close quarters; it’s just hard by, at hand, stone’s throw, simple spit distance earshot.
“So, if anything, we were not more circumspect but less, not less garrulous but more. Is the Prince a clam? Is he an oyster? He brims with prate! He glibs with gush! And this was audience indeed, this was! This primed, fervent, rubberneck, avid, all-ears bunch. My true subjects, Mills, and not your remote, long-range, arm’s-length lot. The group. Our crowd. And I as much their subject this night as they mine. We were soliloqual, Mills!
“ ‘It is your breastplate, madam, those fleecy ramparts, that so astonish us. How may things which to our vision appear such soft and lenient stuff prove so intractable, so stony ground in the campaign of a prince? No no, don’t answer. We would not hear prattle of husbands and virtue, or passion talked down as if’twere only an obligation owed to pledge like the gambler a game debt or the poor student’s circumstanced promise to redeem a watch from some pawnshop Jew. Is this your honor, madam? Is this your merciless, inconsequent, merely proscriptive character? I’ll teach you character, ma’am, and it’s nothing to do with promises, declarations, assurances, covenants or nitwit oath. Honor is simply not contractual, Fitzherbert! It does not blindly undertake action in a future it cannot yet understand at the sacrifice of the only tense in which it may reliably do anyone any good at all. Which is the present. Which is the present, Mrs. Madam Fitzherbert!
“ ‘Honor is ardor. It is dash and fire and thrill. It is the obligation skin owes blood, teeth appetite. My organ’s duty to my mood. It is entirely obsessive and endures no third parties. It welcomes no middlemen.’
“ ‘The Prince of Wales is hot tonight,’ said a guest.
“ ‘He is. He is,’ we acknowledged. ‘We have our honor on us and we fly it like the colors.’
“ ‘And do you know, madam, in what my honor subsists? Why in my peculiar, spangled lust. In the singularity of my ruling passion, my most feeling fetish. Which we neither hide nor hinder, watch nor ward. Why should we? Is the Prince custodian of his ruling passion or only the lowly drayman of his drives?’
“ ‘Hear hear!’ said honored guests. And “Three cheers!’ And ‘Give three times three!’
“ ‘I asked to milk you, madam. No husband but husbandman plain enough. Oh, plain. Plain, quite plainly. I’ve this sweet tooth for softs, this yen for your puddings. George the Famished, George the Parched. Georgie the pap prince. Feed us, ma’am. Slake the slake rake! Sow, sew this rip!’