George IV considered him. “Yes,” he said finally, “I suppose I am.” Then, “You’re our loyal subject you said.”
“Sir, I am,” Mills said.
“Your family swears oaths you said.”
“Millses are pledged to their kings.”
“Yes,” he said, “yes. Look,” he said, striking the document he’d been reading, “your squire’s misinformed. This fellow’s dead.”
“Oh?” he said. “Was it sudden, sir?”
“It was very sudden,” the King said, “but it was over three years ago.”
“Oh,” George said, saddened, not for the dead gentleman, whom he’d never met, or even for himself, so much as for the squire with his frayed, retrograde connections and his sad, dated influence.
“There go your plans, eh?”
“Well …”
“I think I might put you in the way of something.”
“You, Your Highness?”
“It would be chiefly ceremonial of course and not really in your line, but as you’ve just been disappointed and as you’re close by … Would you, do you think you could undertake a mission for us?”
2
They know, I think, that they’re exotic. They must know. Not as the Chinaman is exotic, or the Jew, or red Indian, or savage African. Because, though I’ve never been to the places where such reside, I’ve seen their travelers. Even in England. In parades and circuses, in tailor shops where the government bought my outfits. Coming out here, too. On shipboard a black man poured my tea. And maybe because they were among strangers — here I’m the stranger — they seemed, well, cautious, watchful as boxers. But that’s not it. Unless it’s that these people, in the Jew’s place, the nigger’s, wouldn’t know enough or maybe even care enough to be cautious, though God knows they’re suspicious enough, even among their own. No one trusts anyone. The men doubt the women, the women the men. When a child falls and bruises himself in the street he doesn’t run to his mum for comfort. Sisters don’t look to their brothers to protect them, sons won’t enter a room if their father is in it.
And that’s not it either.
Maybe it’s God.
I’m Church of England but the fact is vicars make me uncomfortable. Whenever I go — which is rare — I go to see society, to hear the choir and watch the gentlemen and gawk as they hand their ladies into and out of the carriages. (It’s where I first spotted Squire.) I mean I don’t belong. (And maybe it’s queer for a Mills to make this admission. It was Greatest Grandfather, after all, who was the indirect deputy of the King himself when he went on that First Crusade. And didn’t I come here myself in the first place at George IV’s request?) So I’m supposed to be Church of England, though I might be more at home as a chapel-meeting Methodist or even as a dissenter, one of the sects. But I’ve been in even fewer chapels than churches, for if vicars and services make me uncomfortable, ministers and everything low church embarrass me. I’m not religious or even much of a believer so much as this snob of God. If there is a God He’s an aristocrat. He’d have gone to the best schools and He’d speak in low tones this absolutely correct accent. He’d sound like the vicar and never shout or even raise His voice like all those others with their full lungs and loud, harsh words prole as low company. So maybe it’s God, their version of Him, makes them so wild, more exotic than gypsies. So maybe it’s God, some pierced-eared, heterodox, heresiarchical, zealous, piratical avatar.
And that’s not it either.
Nor their fierce, rumpus-raveled history, incoherent as rout, mob, high wind.
It’s pride!
I came to Constantinople with a king’s courier, a tall lad named Peterson, not much older than myself, and though we shared the same table on shipboard during the first seating, he was a subdued, taciturn fellow and didn’t enter into conversation easily. I thought at first it was because he was queasy, for I often saw him with his head hanging over the stern rail and caught him throwing up as I returned to my cabin after dessert and coffee and perhaps a brandy. I was nauseous as the courier but had never tasted such fine rare food and was determined not to lose it.
He sometimes summoned me to his cabin or occasionally came to mine, never to chat but to rehearse me in the protocols, my small, silly performance that seemed hardly worthy, even to me, of such expense, so long a voyage. When I questioned him he cut me off and asked me to demonstrate yet again my polished, practiced salaam.
“You’ve seen me do the thing a hundred times.”
“Show me.”
“You know I’ve got it pat.”
“Mahmud II runs a tight court. Show me.”
“Oh very well.” I began the gyrations with my hand, bowed low and ended the fruity salutation with my right palm pressed to my forehead. “There you have it, my sultan.” I thought he was going to be sick.
“Your right palm? Your right?”
“I’m teasing.”
“This is serious. No teasing. Show me.”
I did it again, this time finishing as he’d instructed me.
“You pull something like that before Mahmud …”
“Whoosis, what’shisname, is five years old already. I don’t get it.”
“Abdulmecid. The boy’s name is Abdulmecid.”
“I don’t get it. Abdulmecid’s over five years old. He’s almost gone on six. George IV’s his godfather. Why’d the King wait so long to send him his gift?”
“How often do I have to explain?” the King’s man said with some exasperation. “Islam’s different. The godchild must thank the emissary personally. He has to be able to speak.”
“It’s queer.”
“Excuse me,” Peterson said and rushed from the cabin. Through my porthole I could see him being sick.
My own collywobbles, determined as I was not to lose the unaccustomed delicacies, I still managed to suppress, by an act of the will transforming nausea into a noxious diarrhea, the magnificent broths, gorgeous fowls, grand game and exquisite sweets and pastries metamorphosed into a yellowish, stenchy paste.
Now, when I saw Peterson, I tried to commiserate. “Rough trip,” I’d say.
“It’s not a rough trip,” he’d shoot back. “The sea’s gentle as a lap.”
“It appears calm today,” I’d say, “but there are swells.”
“In your brains,” he’d manage, and vomit violently into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Often, after my salaams, there would be additional exercises, “the Walk of Prostration,” a difficult, almost acrobatic negotiation in which the one approaching the throne has somehow to give off a full-blown ceremony of obsequious, barehead awe, an impression that he hats-in-hand for all mankind, for everything in fact, for whatever life there might be on other planets as well as all there is on this one, the whole while making his salutations and progressing a corridor the length, could be, of two or three good-sized tennis courts at angles of humility which defy gravity. (Not, at that, too difficult a maneuver for a Mills.)
But our cabins were too small and Peterson sometimes insisted that we go up on deck where I might better practice the movement, the suspirant motion of the ship making everything even more difficult, much to the amusement of the sailors and the other passengers. Peterson would stand fifteen or twenty feet in front of me, walking backward, drawing me on.
“Palace architecture was at least partially designed for just this purpose,” he’d explain, “its long throne rooms, the slight pitch of its slippery marble floors. It fair delights a potentate to see men bellyflop.”
“Why do you do these things?” a fellow passenger might ask.