So the letter was no hoax. George Mills, fearing one, had even tampered the crude seal and read it, understanding well enough its heavy sarcasm and the dubious light in which he was portrayed, but putting it in this light, figuring it this way:
His sort don’t mean my sort harm. They’re afraid. As they might be afraid of Vandals or Visigoths. As they might be afraid of trained bears doing comic turns on the high street. They’ve heard things. Stuff about rough ways, muck about manners. They fear for their game, for their gardens and daughters. They misdoubt our religion, and put it about our condition is our character. They think we drink too much and dance makes us crazy.
His jokes are just nervous. All to the good in the end. Serving my purpose. ’Cause he don’t mean me harm, not real harm. One toff to another.
Now the King will read it. Who to the fellow what wrote it is like me to some dog dead in the road. He’ll know. And discount the jokes and mark down the leg pull, all that lively pokebanter, all that scoff-merry and scoldbutt. He’ll know. He’s a king.
King George IV took the greasy letter his subject handed him and, when he saw to whom it was addressed, began to read the letter of introduction as if it were some document intercepted by agents and delivered by urgent and pressing couriers.
He read:
Forgive if you can my blatant impertinence in addressing you in this way about a matter of absolutely no importance and of no small irrelevance, it being the very rule of scientific displacement that that which is of no weight, which is no thing, saving of course our souls, which at all events are, if not by the laws of God then, to our shame, to our shame, at the very indiscreet least by the practices of men, more than we are inconvenienced to believe is good for us, “matters” of substance delayed, due bills to which, through the best grace of that same Divine Agency, accrue no interest, compound or even simple, though admittedly such “small” matters being the exception—the exception, nota bene—while that to which I now direct your offhand attention still participates in that aforementioned phylum or category relating to the antichronistic, metachronous and just plain out of date, and distracts in almost inverse mathematical degree to the extraneous pressures it puts upon us and has, for weightiness, no more power to signal fish than a sinker of soap bubble.
The damned thing’s in code, the King thought. And read on.
Thus the stone in our shoe. Thus idle, vagrant worries which turn us from all true and dutiful concerns to peripheral speculation, random and curious as sudden unexampled messages from the villagers, their puny command-performance performances, shoddy balls, recitals, bumpkin dramatic entertainments and mystery plays, all those abrupt summonses at which our attendance is owed more to custom than obligation. Thus, in brief, all subtly finessed attentions to the self. Welcome enough, and noble enough too, Laird knows, when such attentions are diverted to God and Country, but disconcerting as a fly on your face when all that’s at stake are the caterwaulings of silly young boys whose voices have not yet changed. Thus then this.
Laird? the King thought. Laird knows?
Which I cannot continue without first making certain courteous and proper, albeit, I do assure you, good fellow, entirely sincere inquiries regarding the healths and happinesses of your lovely lady and your remarkable bairn. It has of course been some time since I have been in your wonderful city. After the current reignant first brought Johnny Nash up from Brighton to do his royal imperial his Regent Street for him, but not since it was completed. Completed not, I’m relieved to hear, in the hybrid rajah cum emir cum mehtar cum, I-don’t-know, chinoiseried cacique so many of us had at first feared (after the expensive vulgarity of Brighton itself), but a toned-down and at least vaguely European architecture. I’m even told by some who have actually seen it that it reminds them of a sort of classical Greece, Athens say, if Time hadn’t trashed it. I’ve seen prints of course. Athens indeed! We’ve lost a toned-down Oriental fantasy to a tarted-up Mediterranean one. At least the street appears broad enough. Which must be welcome to one in your profession.
Thus then this.
Bairn? he thought. Remarkable bairn?
The piece of work you see before you calls itself George Mills. I must tell you at the outset that while he is not entirely native to our neighborhood, he has been in residence hereabouts four years, since 1821 I believe, doing agriculture, the sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, threshing, reaping and picking so peculiarly designated to his race and class of stoopers and benders. Though he claims in his more defensive moments family — or, rather more particularly, genealogy. It is a long and sometimes tedious story and if you would hear it you will have to hear it from him. If you regard it as his command performance, recital or dramatic entertainment, as, in short, your own capital call to custom, you will have discharged something so close to obligation that only a talmudic philosophe might tell you the difference.
Four years? 1821? The year Wife Cousin Caroline died, the year after I received my crown and she popped back from Italy to claim her “rights” as Queen Consort. Where was that solicitor now that England needed him? Now that even I needed him? The bill to dissolve the marriage and deny her claims actually introduced and passed in Lords, though she died before it could be put to the vote in Commons. In Commons! When did I grow old who never gave a fart for scandal? Who asked perfect strangers to wet-nurse me and tweaked the tits of titled grandmas? Tweaking before barristers and retainers and the not-so-loyal opposition and even on her deathbed even my wife cousin’s milkless, bloodless old dugs. Our daughter would have been dead four years. Caroline would have been sixty-seven. Where was that damned solicitor? It would never have gotten as far as Lords or Commons with him on the case. He wouldn’t have needed any bills and petitions to quitclaim. She’d be alive today. She’d be alive and back in Italy and thankful to God that the laws he would have told her she’d violated didn’t apply there. Seventy-one and alive and happy and cultivating her olive and lemon trees, taking their juices, at least their odors, at least some extract of them in her pores now so that if I ever saw her again and rubbed her breasts out of passion or even only its phantom, the skin on my hands would at least have come away with the remnant oils of the breathing, breeding earth. So where was that jurisdictional solicitor, that legislature and police force and magistracy of a man?