* * *
*
Late during that Monday, John Howard and Zachary Walsh returned to Howard’s offices after attending the difficult delivery of a child who, for a change, was human. (The birth was breech but expertly turned by Howard’s sure hand, so there was no need to break any of the baby’s limbs, or do worse still to save the life of the mother; the child, a girl, had ten fingers and toes and was perfectly, blessedly normal. Man-midwife and apprentice left the new family, the woman exhausted, her husband relieved, their daughter red-faced and wailing as if to alarm all the devils in hell.) Once inside the offices they found that a gentleman had somehow gained entrance ahead of them, and had made himself at home in Howard’s waiting room, seated in a chair and paging idly through the copy of Locke he’d lifted off Howard’s desk.
He looked as if he were about to deliver the eulogy at his own funeral—skeletally slender, dressed in black from head to toe, his wig a lightly powdered white. His face was long and gaunt, with paper-thin lips and a narrow, aquiline nose; his eyes were a dark brown that seemed almost black, his eyebrows mere suggestions. “You’ve gotten rather a bit farther than most in this, it seems,” he remarked as he snapped the book shut, replaced it on Howard’s desk, and rose. “Greetings,” he said, crossing the room and offering his hand, which John took (it was cold and limp, the shake unvigorous). “I am Sir Richard Manningham, Fellow of the Royal Society and Licentiate of the College of Physicians, and I come at—”
“—the request of King George?” said John.
“Yes—it seems you find this unsurprising. I’ve been preceded, I believe, by several others. You might imagine that my colleague Ahlers’s report was…most unusual. St. André must still be here. And other observers, unassociated with any of us or with the king, appear to be arriving on their own initiative. Which leads me to my next point. I fear,” he sighed, “that the local inn is full, and I have no place to stay. Your abode looked to me as if it might have some space you might offer, for which I’d be quite grateful.”
* * *
*
If Ahlers’s presence had occasioned a bluster from Nathanael St. André, Manningham’s brought on a not entirely unwelcome silence—St. André was the quietest of the six who sat at Alice’s table for dinner that afternoon. She served a turkey dressed in the German style, stuffed with forcemeat and roasted chestnuts, accompanied with turnips and sausages sliced and mixed together; Manningham chose to content himself with a single turkey leg on an otherwise empty plate, as if he endeavored to eat the minimum necessary to keep his soul tethered to his body. “My compliments on the dish,” he said to Alice, surgically removing each bite of meat from the leg with precise, fastidious movements of his fork and knife, stripping the bone completely clean, occasionally sawing futilely at the bone with the knife, as if he wished to cut through it to get at the marrow. “You may have guessed, incidentally, that due to a superstition suddenly in vogue, rabbit rarely appears on London plates as of late—our poulterers find themselves tossing coneys away unsold. And there is now some debate in intellectual circles—facetious, one would hope—concerning whether rabbits have souls. Some would have it that we may have been mistaken about the creatures, all this time. That we unwittingly committed the direst of sins whenever we enjoyed a rabbit fricassee.” A rasping sound came from his throat that seemed intended to approximate a laugh.
“A strange vision of heaven,” Alice said. “Seraphim tripping over hordes of the creatures bounding underfoot. Imagine the stink.”
That grating rasp from Manningham, again—he seemed as if he’d made the decision early on in life to embrace the power of his physiognomy and demeanor to unsettle, and yet that did not entirely explain St. André’s sudden onset of diffidence. “I should clarify my stance on this matter,” Manningham said. “It is, you may have guessed, skeptical, and my skepticism is supported both by my years of prior experience and my status as perhaps the preeminent man-midwife in London.”
“And if you persist in your skepticism, you will find yourself standing alone,” St. André said finally, his sentence ending in an unmanly squeak. He cleared his throat and then continued: “You have seen the groups of people arriving here. Hundreds, now, who all believe. They cannot all be incorrect. And tomorrow morning, when you witness one of her births firsthand—”
“The arrivals can be predicted in such a timely fashion? Within a few hours? Odd.”
“Yes—it’s merely another part of the miracle. You will see it for yourself, and then you will have no reasonable choice to believe, as the rest do. As does he, and he, and he.” He pointed a finger at John, Laurence, and Zachary.
“I can’t help but notice that you’ve left our wonderful hostess off your list of adherents.”
“I continue to keep my own counsel,” said Alice.
Zachary and Laurence ate quietly, heads bent over their plates; John looked placidly at his wife, his face a plaster mask.
Eventually, Manningham reclined in his chair, his long-fingered hands steepled as he gazed at the ceiling. “For some reason, I am strongly reminded of a fable that my mother heard from her father, who, family legend has it, received it in turn from a Spaniard nobleman, passing through London on his travels. Transformed in the telling and retelling, perhaps; distorted by translation in addition. All the same, it is a good story—I offer it as payment for my seat at this table. My mother called it ‘the tale of the king and the three impostors.’ ”
“I love a good tale,” Zachary spoke up, finding Manningham’s offer unexpected, but thinking that a story might mitigate the unwelcome tension at the table.
“And your title already promises something more agreeable to the ear than the endless chatter of these other fellows,” said Alice. “Please: begin.”
* * *
*
“In a tiny kingdom whose name is lost to history,” said Manningham, “three impostors approached a king, presenting themselves as weavers with the rarest of talents. They claimed to be able to manufacture a cloth that was unparalleled in its beauty, exquisite in its design—moreover, it had the ability to distinguish those men who were legitimate sons of their fathers from those who were bastards. To the bastard, the cloth would be invisible; only a legitimate son would be able to see it and appreciate its magnificence.
“The king immediately saw the value of such a cloth, for the kingdom’s laws declared that bastards could not inherit the property of their cuckold fathers, and in such instances the property of the deceased would go to the state. He showered the impostors with silver and gold, assigned them a wing of rooms in his palace where they would not be disturbed, and set them to work.
“The impostors stayed in seclusion for seven months, only dispatching occasional requests for servants to bring them sweetmeats and wine; eventually, the king sent his lord chamberlain into their private wing to observe their progress. The impostors, who had become surprisingly corpulent and red-faced since anyone had last seen them, with ruptured veins coloring their noses, escorted the lord chamberlain into the chamber where they went about their labor. In the midst of disorder—plates with sauces dried to crust; half-full glasses of beer; discarded women’s undergarments—was a loom, and on the loom, saw the lord chamberlain, was nothing.
“ ‘Is it not wonderful?’ said one of the impostors, gesturing at the empty loom. ‘So beautiful that one might be blinded by it, were one to look upon it for too long. You must take care: avert your eyes if you begin to feel faint.’ Of course, the lord chamberlain began to recall a few moments in his youth when he had spied his mother closeted in conversation with one of the family’s gardeners and she had protested, perhaps a touch too vehemently, that she was doing nothing wrong, and that what he saw was best forgotten. ‘It is wonderful,’ said the lord chamberlain. ‘So stunning that I can barely believe my eyes.’
“ ‘You notice the intricate weaving together of
spun gold and silver threads?’ The impostor lifted nothing in his hands and held it toward the lord chamberlain. ‘Supple and smooth to the touch, yet it would turn away an assassin’s dagger thrust. Do you wish to feel it?’
“The lord chamberlain retreated. ‘To touch such fabric is a privilege I do not deserve: it must be reserved for the king. I am content merely to look. I am quite satisfied that the work is progressing apace; I leave you to your labors.’ The trio of impostors sent him on his way with a long rumbling belch in three-part harmony.”
Nathanael St. André interrupted at that point. “I find myself puzzled by your choice of narrative,” he said. “Its ribaldry might be judged unsuitable for the company of a woman; moreover, it threatens to touch on the topic of fraud, and I worry that it may lead you to stray into unintended and undeserved insinuations that you would later recall with remorse.”
“Oh, I’ve heard worse,” said Alice. “I’ve said worse. Please don’t concern yourself with my womanish sensibilities, good Sir Richard.”
“I shall not,” said Manningham, “and as for the matter of fraud, those who do not commit it—which, presumably, includes all of us seated here at this table—have nothing to fear from a tale that features it. But perhaps fraud is not the story’s principal concern, in the end? Let it unspool in its own time.
“To continue.”
* * *
*
“The impostors worked on the fabric for another year, and eventually, the king became impatient. Rousing himself from his throne, he entered their private rooms and found them in the chamber where they labored: to his surprise, he found that twelve months of meats and pastries had enlarged them astonishingly, making them tiny-eyed and triple-chinned; moreover, they were completely naked, and stood before him without shame, innocent as Adam. Before the king could declare his shock, anger, and disgust, one of the impostors approached him, head bowed, flesh quivering, and with a tremulous voice he made a confession: that as their bodies had grown and their original clothing no longer fit, they had used the special fabric to make three suits for themselves. ‘We realize that only a king deserves to clothe himself in such splendor,’ the impostor said as, behind him, the other two turned in circles with their arms raised, modeling nothing but their own folds of fat. ‘I hope to restrain your justifiable anger with the news that we have, just today, completed a fourth suit of this material for yourself: your native resplendence will only serve to amplify the beauty of the fabric, casting the three of us in shadow.’
“It was impossible to even consider the possibility that the three impostors would be so bold as to exhibit themselves naked before the king and tell a flagrant lie: such impertinence defied belief. And so the king knew, or thought he knew, two things: that the fabric functioned as the impostors had advertised, and that he himself was a bastard, unaware of this until now. As for the latter fact, no one else needed to know—in fact, the knowledge had to be kept secret, lest a pretender to the throne appear and the nation plunge into war. As for the former: well, it was high time for all the other bastards to unwittingly reveal themselves, so that their so-called parents would fill the king’s coffers. Praising the impostors’ workmanship and thanking them profusely, the king ordered the suit they had made for him to be boxed and brought to his living quarters, and commanded that a day in the following week be set aside for a grand procession, at whose head he would appear; no one would work that day, and attendance would be mandatory. He would wear the miraculous suit, display it to the populace, and in the reactions to his wardrobe he would see what he would see.”
“It sounds as if our poor king has quite the embarrassment in store,” said John, chuckling.
“Perhaps,” said Manningham.
* * *
*
“On the day of the grand procession,” Manningham continued, “a tradesman, whose name is also lost to history, closed his shop as the royal edict demanded and took his young son to view the parade. They were among the first to arrive along the route, and they staked out a spot at the side of the road where they could have a clear view.
“The tradesman’s loves could be counted on one hand, but they were simple and pure: he loved his family, and he loved his nation. If pressed, it would be difficult for him to say which he loved more. Family provided benefits that were immediate and constant, real and easy to cherish—the warmth of your wife’s embrace, the merry laughter of your daughters, or the way in which your only son looked up at you with a mother’s inherited eyes. But family, wonderful as it could be, was precarious, and ephemeral in the great scheme of things. A human life was but a moment, measured against the life of a nation. No one knew when death might steal one’s wife or son or daughter away, but a nation’s love for its citizens would last forever; the nation had existed long before the tradesman had been born, and it would remain long afterward, to safeguard the livelihoods of his descendants after he himself had passed. To have a wife look into your eyes provided a small, daily, dependable reassurance that you were loved, and that you deserved love. But what would that be compared to falling, even briefly, under the kind scrutiny of a king who embodied the nation that granted succor to so many? Even a short glance would serve to affirm a man’s sureness of his worth for decades. And to meet the king’s eyes as a boy might set that boy on the path to becoming a great man.
“Such was the thinking of the tradesman who pulled his sleepy-eyed son out of his bed at sunrise, to wait for the king’s appearance; he thought it best to let his daughters sleep.
“As the time for the parade approached the crowd became larger, and larger still, the noise of the thousands in garrulous conversation behind them becoming louder and louder. The sun was high in a cloudless sky; the weather was perfect, with a slight cooling wind to counteract the heat of bodies pressed together. The tradesman and his son were at the very front of the throng; they would not have to crane their necks or bob their heads to see the king as he passed, clothed in what was rumored to be the most fantastic royal robe that man had ever laid eyes on, in all of human history. The robe had become the foremost topic of conversation among all the nation’s citizens; they spent sleepless nights attempting to imagine that which was beyond imagining.
“At noon sharp the tradesman heard a cheer in the distance, the roar rising in volume as it came closer, and he looked down the road to see the royal procession approaching: lines of soldiers marching in spirited step, their legs kicking high; flautists and trumpeters and drummers playing the national anthem; flags and pennants flapping. The tradesman’s heart began to hurl itself against his rib cage, as if it wanted to burst free of his chest and flop down on the road before him, offering itself up to be trampled.
“At the front of the procession was the king himself, standing proud in the rear of a wagon towed by six white horses, arms akimbo, grinning with his chin jutted forward and held high. And as the tradesman looked on the king, he squinted as if blinded, not quite trusting his eyes—
“And then he saw the robe. He saw it, and he freely wept. It shimmered; it shone; it altered. Sometimes it appeared as the colors of the national flag, in sumptuous shades of crimson, ivory, and ultramarine; sometimes it appeared as if the king had shrouded himself in a thousand ribbons made of rainbows. The sheer magnificence of the king’s clothing threatened to bring the tradesman to faintness, but with a strength of will, the cheers of the crowd around him resounding in his ears, he managed to stay upright, keep his head, and direct his son to look.
“The young boy’s eyes widened as his mouth dropped open, and he first began to chuckle, then to laugh without restraint, his high-pitched haw-haw-haw cutting through the applause. The tradesman became confused: was laughter the expression of the child’s awe? ‘Do you see it?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
“The boy laughed, harder still, and pointed. ‘He’s naked!’ he shouted. ‘The king is naked!’
“
And at that, the wagon with its six white horses slowed, then stopped, as the cheering of the crowd began to be shot through with murmurs of consternation. Puzzled, the tradesman looked up at the king and, to his alarm, found that the king was staring directly back at him with a cruel, confident smile, and, worse, he was in fact as naked as he’d been on the day of his birth, with drooping old man’s breasts, a sagging, wrinkled bottom, and a limp, shriveled yard, crowned with a tangled gray thatch of pubic hair. And yet he seemed unembarrassed; the smile remained on his face with its knowing twist, as if the king was waiting for the tradesman to realize something, and to take a necessary course of action. The king seemed strangely unworried that the crowd behind the tradesman was becoming enraged, the clamor of their shouts developing a nasty edge—it was only the child who was consumed by gay, mocking laughter, and as the tradesman felt a hand grasp his shoulder from behind, perhaps in threat, perhaps in reassurance, he looked up into the naked king’s eyes, and he knew what he had to do.
“Standing behind his son, he bent over him, and he whispered a brief, heartfelt apology in his ear. Then, with an ease surprising even to himself, he snapped the child’s neck.”
(At the dining table, Zachary started, for it seemed to him that he had somehow heard the break of the boy’s neck just as clearly as he had heard Manningham describe it; before his eyes he saw the child’s head canting at an unnatural angle, his face going slack as he collapsed to the ground like a marionette cut loose from its strings. Then he saw that as Manningham had spoken, he’d taken the turkey bone from which he’d stripped every last string of meat, held it in both hands, and broken it in two. Later, thinking about it, Zachary would realize that the whole time Manningham had been working away on the turkey leg, he’d been quietly scoring the bone with his knife blade—he’d begun the dinner with the intent to tell this story, to create this dramatic moment.)
Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen Page 14
