She shrugged. “Our duty will be done. You can go back to your stars and sky at Kew, and I will no longer have to view your face.”
He swooped into a mocking bow. “Your Majesty.”
She gave him a regal nod. Him! And then she pointed to the door. “Get out.”
“With pleasure.” He slammed open the door and left.
Buckingham House
Monro’s Laboratory
18 September 1761
The next few days were no better. George still had no idea why Charlotte was so upset with him, but in all honesty, he was so angry that he wasn’t sure he cared any longer.
More to the point, he didn’t have time to worry about her. Monro had stepped up his treatment, and George was now spending the better part of each day in the Buckingham House cellar.
The doctor lamented the loss of his iron chair and was convinced that George’s progress was hampered because of it.
“Your diet, too,” Doctor Monro said. “It is a problem.”
“If I could eat the gruel at dinner, I would,” George said wearily. “But it would cause too much talk.”
“It is a problem.”
George resisted the urge to say, “Yes, you’d mentioned.” It did not do to display insolence with the doctor. It earned him extra time in the ice bath, and Monro’s assistants had taken to holding his head underwater for increasingly longer periods of time.
“We will have to make up for these deficiencies in other ways,” Monro decided. “The gag!”
One of his assistants rushed forward and did his bidding. George’s wrists and ankles had already been bound to the hard wooden chair, so now he was well and truly diminished.
“You cannot speak,” Monro said, “so you must think the thoughts as I give them to you. Do you understand me, boy?”
George nodded.
“You must learn to submit. You must realize that you are no one. You are no better than anyone else.” Monro walked to the wall, where several of his instruments had been hung on hooks. He took some time selecting the right one, eventually settling on a thin rod.
“With every strike, you must think to yourself, ‘I am no one.’ Do you understand?”
George nodded again, eyeing the rod with trepidation. Up to this point, Doctor Monro had not struck him with anything other than his hand.
Monro handed the rod to his assistant. “We shall begin.” He nodded, and the assistant brought the rod down across George’s thighs. It stung, but it wasn’t as painful as George had anticipated.
“Did you think it?” Monro demanded.
George had forgotten. He shook his head. He needed to be honest if he wanted his treatment to progress.
“Harder,” Monro instructed his assistant.
The rod came down with a slap.
I am no one, George thought.
“Did you think it?”
This time George nodded.
“Did you believe it?”
George gave a little shrug. Maybe? Honestly, he was not sure.
Monro regarded him for a moment, then must have decided it was still progress because he nodded and moved to the other side of the room, where he sat and picked up his notebook. Barely looking up from his notes, he said, “Again.”
Slap!
I am no one.
“Again.”
Slap!
Monro frowned. “He does not seem to be reacting.”
George’s eyes widened and he grunted from behind his gag.
“Move to his hands.”
George strained against his restraints. Unlike his thighs, his hands were bare. This was going to—
Whack!
George screamed.
“Much better,” Monro grunted.
Whack!
“Are you following my directions?”
George nodded.
Whack!
I am no one.
Whack!
I am no one.
Whack!
“Careful not to let him bleed,” Monro said. He frowned as he leaned to the side to get a better look at George’s hands. “It will cause questions.”
The assistant nodded, and the next blow landed on George’s forearms, which had heretofore been spared.
“Although I suppose we could just put him in gloves,” Monro said.
I am no one. I am no one.
Whack! Back on the hands.
I am no one.
“Are you following my directions?” Monro asked.
George nodded vigorously. Tears had escaped his eyes and had soaked into his gag. He was mortified.
“Good. Then it is working.” Monro looked back at his assistant. “Let’s keep at it.”
Whack!
I am no one.
Whack!
I am no one.
I am no one . . .
Two days later
He was the King.
He kept saying that he was no one and thinking he was no one, but when he awakened in the morning, he knew he was King.
It was all he had been born to be.
But George wanted to be well, and every time he saw Charlotte in the hall, her distaste for him written on her face, it renewed his determination to see this treatment through to the end.
Did she somehow see through his façade? Had she detected the madness behind his eyes?
Even at night, on those even days when they yelled and screamed and, yes, fucked, there was no tenderness on her part, nothing to indicate that she saw him as anything other than a source of physical pleasure.
And a baby. Mustn’t forget that.
It made him want to redouble his efforts. Once they got her pregnant they wouldn’t have to see each other again, and wouldn’t that be marvelous? No more insults hurled at him from every corner. No more glares from that annoying diminutive servant of hers. What was his name again? Burdock? Bramwell?
Brimsley. That was it. Brimsley. He kept glaring at George as if he were to blame for the current palace mood, which ranged between explosive and already on fire.
It was Charlotte. It was her fault. He was being reasonable—well, as reasonable as one could expect from a madman—and furthermore, he’d been submitting to bloody torture trying to cure himself.
True, she wasn’t precisely aware that he was doing this, or that he was occasionally touched in the head, but somewhere someone was keeping score, and he was definitely doing his part.
“God damn it,” he tried to say.
Tried, because per usual, he’d been gagged.
“What was that?” Monro asked, looking up from his infernal little notebook. “Ungag him.”
One of the assistants, the one George had decided to call Helmut, untied the gag.
George spat as it was removed. “We have been at this for days. How much longer?”
“As long as it takes to achieve our goal,” Monro said with all calmness. “That was our agreement.”
“Our goal was to restore me to myself. Much more of this and I will not have a self to return to. Is a broken king really better than a mad one?”
Monro set down the notebook and moved his hand through the air, much like a teacher might visually punctuate a lecture. “I do not call it the ‘terrific method’ for nothing. Terror is its very basis. But from that terror, what result.”
George was not reassured by the way the doctor shivered with delight when he said, “what result.”
“The wolves of the German Black Forest were famous,” Monro continued, rising to his feet. “The fiercest in the world. Not content to steal chickens and cattle, they would run off with children. The old. But where are those wolves now?”