“Once, ten years ago,” Morgan told us matter-of-factly, “when I first got to know him, Cook offered to arrange a murder for me. Said it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t take him up on it, but I didn’t have the impression he was boasting, either.”
We didn’t press; perhaps Andrews, like me, wondered uncomfortably whether the victim was to have been the late Mrs Morgan or someone involved in her death. Given the whispering campaign against him, Morgan’s remark seemed ill-considered — but I took it as a mark of his trust, and was in any case more interested in Cook’s possible connexions with André, perhaps via the Free-Quebec people. And Morgan was so healthy-looking, so cheerfully normal, even boyish of face, it was impossible to imagine him involved in anything clandestine, much less violent. Todd Andrews dismissed the whole “Second Revolution business”—which he assumed was what the rumoured leftism added up to — as another of Cook’s cranky red herrings, and wished only that he wouldn’t feed Harrison’s folly with it. Morgan agreed that it might well be mere crankery, but considered it dangerous crankery withal. And so the evening ended, Andrews remarking as he bade me good night that in his opinion my own unexpected role in his friend’s delusion was more therapeutic, at least palliative, than not. He hoped I would indulge poor Harrison as far as my discretion permitted.
Given two so agreeable alternative candidates, why did I, a month or two later, become Harrison Mack’s mistress? To begin with, after Fort Erie I had resolved, as I’ve explained, to try to put André behind me, for the sake of my own sanity, though of course etc. And I have never been given to celibacy! Had either Andrews or Morgan shown particular interest — but they didn’t. Morgan was perhaps the likelier possibility, though rather young for my taste (i.e., about my own age); but before we came to know each other well enough for me to tell him about André, for example, and explain his relationship to Cook, Morgan had resigned, gone to Amherst, “freaked out,” and disappeared. Andrews I found (and find) attractive too, despite the Eastern Shore brogue and Southern manner; we became and remain affectionate friends. But though a confirmed bachelor, he has, I gather, other, more established female friendships, and in his late sixties is no libertine.
With his urging joined to Jane’s and Doctor #2’s, I spent much time at Tidewater Farms after Jane left, when too Harrison’s manner somewhat altered. As his general condition rapidly declined, he grew at once madder and more lucid. The wife he’d had “when he was in the world,” as he came to phrase it, he pitied, admired, and understood well, in my estimation; he hoped “the real George III” had been as fortunate, on balance, with Queen Charlotte. He was glad Jane was not present in his “final stages,” for both their sakes; they had loved each other, he was certain she still wished him well, as he did her, and he had no doubt that widowhood would be a relief for her. He knew now, more often than not, that he wasn’t “really” George III—“any more than George III was, in his last years”: that he was the victim of a psychopathological delusion, whose cause and possible cure remained mysterious and were of no further interest to him. The world of Harrison Mack, Redmans Neck, 20th-century America, caused him great pain; the world of George III, Windsor, early 19th-century England, was somehow soothing, never mind wherefore. An inoperable patient, he craved now only palliation. With Jane’s long-distance consent we discharged Doctor #1, and left #2 on call merely in the event of some unforeseen lapse of control. He was summoned only once thereafter.
Harrison begged me to move into the house: it was convenient to the campus; it was big enough so that I need endure his company no more than I wished; his own library was as good as the college’s; I wouldn’t need to bother with marketing, cooking, housekeeping. Even the masquerade would not be very tiresome (no costumes required!), since we could freely discuss anything so long as he could speak of me as Lady Pembroke: I could leave it to him, as he left it to his madness, to do the complicated translation. From London, Jane seconded the motion. I consulted Andrews, who warmly approved.
If I never loved His Majesty, I truly liked him, and never simply pitied him. I meant to move out as soon as Jane returned, but she stayed on, somehow managing Mack Enterprises by remote control. In the first half of ’68, especially, Harrison was a delightful companion: witty, generous, thoughtful. In my absence, so the house staff reported, he gave free rein to his follies: that we must fly to Denmark to escape the deluge; that we were aboard Noah’s ark; that it was not too late to undo the fiasco of the American War. Directly I returned, the George/ Elizabeth business became little more than an elaborate (if unremitting) way of speaking. Somewhere along the road our good friendship came to include sleeping together: my memory is that one snowy night in January, as I read student essays and sipped brandy by the fire and Harrison played Jephthah’s lamentation on the harpsichord, he suddenly said: “Let’s redo history, what?” And then proposed that, since the king and Lady Pembroke never did get to bed together, and since we weren’t really they, we improve the facts by doing what they didn’t.
“Dear Germaine,” he concluded, “I should enjoy that very much.” Had he not used, that once, my real name…
My person and modest competency never so gratified a man, before or since. You will want details: there are none, particularly. Seventy is not impotent, except as alcohol, illness, or social conditioning have made it so; it has no stamina, loves its sleep, will not stand without coaxing, draws aim more often than it fires — but it will go to’t, smartly too, with the keener joy in what it can no longer take for granted. Harrison relished each connexion as he relished fine days and dinners, knowing he had not a great many left. Jane had put sex behind her years since; the chap was starved for it, and knew what he was about. I have made sorry choices in my life: becoming Harrison’s Lady Elizabeth was not one. A pleasurable semester.
During the which, whilst I waited word from André or a fair glimpse of our son, and endeavoured to impart to my Marshyhopers some sense of what is meant by the terms Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism (but how, when almost nothing their eyes fall upon was there the day before yesterday?), and watched poor embattled Morgan yield at last on the misbegotten Tower of Truth, and confirmed my addiction to oysters in any form, I tried in vain to mend the old quarrel between Harrison and his son, whom I came to know and rather like. (The daughter Jeannine—“Bea Golden”—was another matter: between drying-out visits to that Fort Erie “sanatorium,” she was busy divorcing her third husband out in California and — what we didn’t know at this time — attaching herself to Mr Prinz.) On this subject my friend was truly deluded: he believed his son an unprincipled weakling and Reg Prinz, for some reason or other, a scrupulous fellow, when from all I could observe Drew Mack was, if somewhat gullible, the very soul of moral principle, pursuing ardently what he believed just and good, whereas Prinz (whom too I saw once or twice more that year) has I daresay no principles at all except cinematographic, and even those he seems to improvise on the run. Suffice it as illustration of their scrupulosity that Drew — who had no salary, worked without pay for his liberal causes (to which he also donated his trust income), and frankly coveted his parents’ wealth for the sake of these same causes — never to my knowledge imputed mercenary motives to my liaison with his father, whom he was gratified to see so happy in my society. Whereas Prinz, in a rare burst of sustained verbality, advised me one evening in June, just after Harrison’s great seizure: “If he leaves you a bundle, put it into the flick. Double or nothing.”