Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“You’re some upstart pretender, ain’t you?” His Majesty said.

“No, sir. I swear it.”

“Yes you are. You’re one of those wicked, wretched claimants.”

“Me? In these rags?”

“A clever disguise.”

“I’m your loyalest subject.”

“My closest follower?” the King asked slyly.

“Sir?”

“Come come, you’re not stupid. You’re a spy.”

“I never am,” I told him forcefully. But you don’t disagree with a king, and added, “Your Royal Highness.”

“Oh yes,” he said disconsolately. “Our Royal Highness indeed. Our Real Whoreness. Our Rogue Whoness.”

“I may not listen to treason, sire.”

“Treason,” the King said miserably.

“Who disparages my king treasons my country.”

Then, changing his mood once again: “How did you find the safe house?”

“The safe—?”

“Whom did you bribe? The neighbors, was it?”

“Sir, I don’t even know the neighbors.” And I looked around. We were standing in the kitchen. Or what would have been the kitchen if there’d been a stove, cooking implements, even a kitchen table. It was without furnishings. Through the open door at the back of the room I could glimpse other vacant rooms. “Would this be your castle then?” I asked, trying to keep the misgivings and nervousness out of my voice, for the place I’d seen from the outside was barely larger than the croft cottages at home, and I’d begun to suspicion that the gentleman was some mad imposter. George IV, or whoever he was, studied me a moment.

“Restored,” he said. “What do you think? Not too busy?”

“Sir, I don’t think so.”

“We’re so pleased.”

Well we’re not stupid. And of course I knew that it wasn’t Buckingham House and that the King — if he was the King, for by this time I had more than doubts — was bantering with me, but how do you banter with royalty, or with madmen either, if that’s what it came to? I haven’t the gift of humoring people. (Or of hiding motives either, wearing my interiority on my sleeve like kings their handkerchiefs. I had actually taken a penny out of my purse and was glancing from it to the “king” as a man might check a map against the very landscape he stands in.) And now the man who claimed to be George IV had drawn a pistol and was pointing it at me. I could see that the handle was encrusted with jewels that formed the same same seal I’d seen on his kerchief.

“Who gave us away?” he asked sadly.

“But no one did,” I said, and tried to explain what I was doing there and told him of my desire to drive carriages. “I’m here to guide coaches, sir. To handle traps and landaus, phaetons and broughams and tilburies. To make my profession in curricles, cabriolets, all the gigs and all the buggies. All the buckboards and berlins. I mean to follow my star in whitechapels, in shays and clarences, in shandrydans and charabancs. I would take my place behind the horses.” The man watched me carefully. “I’m into traffic,” I said shyly. And told him nothing of my having no destination of my own, just my vague wish to go where other men went. And breathed no word about my hackman’s heart. But mentioned Squire’s letter in my behalf which I carried under my blouse, offering to show it to him, already beginning to raise the loose garment when he extended the pistol, thrusting it forward in the close quarters, aiming as if it were his turn in a duel.

I closed my eyes. “Oh, I hope you are the King, Your Highness,” I told him. “I hope you outrank everyone on this island. All the islands, all the continents, all the world. I hope this murder is sanctioned by divine right and ain’t just the heatless, heartless, whimwham of just some anybody brokeheart bedlamite.”

“You don’t acknowledge the Hanoverian legitimacy! You, you—”

Of course it was possible that he was George IV and crazy too. There was plenty of precedent on the books. The rumors about his father, for example.

“I’m a Mills. If you’re George Hanover I’m your subject. None loyaler. I’ve pledged allegiances. I’ve sworn oaths.”

“Commoners don’t swear oaths.”

“Millses do.”

“They’re not required.”

“Millses require them.”

And that’s when I told him some of our history, the long story I’d been memorizing and then rehearsing all my life. Since I’d first heard it. Bringing in details about my life I hadn’t memorized only because no one had ever related them to me, and hadn’t known I’d been rehearsing only because I thought of nothing else. Who was only eighteen years old and without a son and so had no one to tell it to but a king in his sixties. Not the whole story of course, only an overview, the themes and highlights, the way my father had introduced it to me.

“Oh, oaths,” he said dismissively when I’d finished. “All fealty’s faked submission holds. I know all about that. Why God limbered the neck and hinged the knee. You think kings care for your crawled compliance and cross-my-hearts? Or put much stock in dubious duty’s danced obedience?

“We were Prince of Wales,” he said. “Then Prince Regent. Ceremonially sworn ourselves, hands on Bibles, hands on hearts. On state occasions to Father cried ‘God save the King!’ when all we meant was ‘Happy birthday.’ Zeal just informed politics lying low. Lying.

“Come come, George the Forty-third—”

“Twenty-second.”

“Indeed,” he said shrewdly, “Twenty-second. Using our king’s packed calibrations, statecraft’s Celsius metrics. Come come, George. (See? I speak to you as George to George and put away my pistol. I couldn’t use it anyway.) Come come then. What is it you want? Why do you lie in wait for me at my safe house?” Then his face darkened and I knew he was the King. Not his resemblance to the face on my penny nor his expensive accessories, nor even his strange manner of speech, but the suffusion itself, the royal blood heavy as sap with mood. “You’ve come from Brighton! You’re a reveler! Something’s happened to Maria!”

“Maria?”

“Mrs. Fitzherbert,” he said.

“Mrs. Fitzherb—”

And suddenly his hands were at his throat as if he meant to do himself an injury. Pulling clumsily at his neck scarf — he was King all right, valet-tended, no more familiar with the loops and intricacies of his complicated adornments than a babe in a nursery — unwinding, it seemed, bolts of the stuff, twirling it away from him like noose, like lariat, a dark silk spiral that rose over his face and head like black smoke. A huge diamond fastener rolled on the floor against his shoe. He kicked it furiously away from him. And now his hands were at his collar tearing at the precious cloth, murderously ripping it, and I thought: Why, he’s choking, the King of Great Britain, Hanover and Ireland is choking, and rushed to his side, though I didn’t know what to do, or no, knew well enough what to do but was reluctant to do it, too timid to pound the back of a king — even a king in extremis — as if he were just some pal in a tavern. So I stood there gawking, gawky, close up as some morbid witness, and could only moan over and over like an idiot, “God save the King, God save the King!”

And now, having stripped himself of cravat and torn his shirt, his hands tightened about folds of actual skin, working his neck as if he meant to strangle himself, me still incapable of interfering with him and able only to mutter my mad “God save the King’s,” and then, in crazy desperation, suddenly recalling his words. Leaning even further forward, my lips almost in his ear. “Happy birthday,” I prompted, “happy birthday, George IV.”

“Help,” he gasped. “Help us for God’s sake. We can’t get the damned thing.” It was that “us” and “we” that got me. A king bent on wringing his own neck and still mindful of the royal grammar, his brain still locked on the King’s English, his sovereign’s syntax. That was when the loyalest subject in the land raised his hands against his king, the two of us co-conspirators in his regicide. I placed my strong young hands over his fat old weak ones, as yet adding no additional pressure of my own, intending only to encourage him in his efforts, a new form, a sort of King’s touch in reverse. Touching the King. He stared up at me with a wild eye and squawked through the muffling medium of our two pairs of hands, our twenty tight-knit fingers. “Are you — are you trying to kill us? Take your hands off me— us —you — you Stuart!”