Four years? 1821? The year Wife Cousin Caroline died, the year after I received my crown and she popped back from Italy to claim her “rights” as Queen Consort. Where was that solicitor now that England needed him? Now that even I needed him? The bill to dissolve the marriage and deny her claims actually introduced and passed in Lords, though she died before it could be put to the vote in Commons. In Commons! When did I grow old who never gave a fart for scandal? Who asked perfect strangers to wet-nurse me and tweaked the tits of titled grandmas? Tweaking before barristers and retainers and the not-so-loyal opposition and even on her deathbed even my wife cousin’s milkless, bloodless old dugs. Our daughter would have been dead four years. Caroline would have been sixty-seven. Where was that damned solicitor? It would never have gotten as far as Lords or Commons with him on the case. He wouldn’t have needed any bills and petitions to quitclaim. She’d be alive today. She’d be alive and back in Italy and thankful to God that the laws he would have told her she’d violated didn’t apply there. Seventy-one and alive and happy and cultivating her olive and lemon trees, taking their juices, at least their odors, at least some extract of them in her pores now so that if I ever saw her again and rubbed her breasts out of passion or even only its phantom, the skin on my hands would at least have come away with the remnant oils of the breathing, breeding earth. So where was that jurisdictional solicitor, that legislature and police force and magistracy of a man?
“Sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, thrashing, reaping and picking,” he read.
Picking? Picking?
“…his command performance,” he read. “…your own capital call to…obligation.”
He looked at Mills sadly.
When did I grow old? he wondered again. When did good time Charlie become the battler king?
But this was later, this was afterward, when George Mills, driven to understand his predicament, had gone over it a hundred times in his head, when he had ceased thinking of it in terms of the artifact he now knew it to be, a pretentious letter of introduction, and began to look at it as the one man in the world must have done who not only had never been intended to read it but who, now that Mills understood what he had done by showing it to him, was the single person it should at all costs have been kept from. Mills would never forgive himself. But this was a later construction. Now the King was reading about him, and Mills was beside himself in dizzy, crazy glee.
The King read. The damage was done and the King read.
I know him to be, for his sort, a hard enough worker in precisely those areas his sort, though qualified for by Nature and Nature’s God, too often and too often too deliberately neglects when push comes to dig. It may even be a sort of unwitting deception on my part, a benefit of the doubt too generously given (though we both know that if no doubt had its generous benefit, there wouldn’t be a king left on his throne or a satrap on his elephant in all the world), but I actually believe the baggage to have some ambition and even a kind of quality. Though, admittedly, of a most irregular and not immediately recognizable, or recognized, sort.
Mills was never regularly employed on my holdings. Like many of the peasants hereabouts he found it more to his taste and, quite frankly, to ours in this backwater, more rattleborough than riding, to declare himself rather more the day laborer than the tenant farmer, though my managers tell me that he always appeared whenever he was scheduled and went through the motions of his motions with no complaint and some enthusiasm. One has gone so far as to declare that if we had more like him we might actually manage to bring in a crop now and again.
But to the point.
He first called my attention to himself one day when I was driving past on the road in the quaint little cabriolet which I think I may have spoken of, either to you or to Ann, when I last visited your fair city—can five years have passed since that golden time? While I was still some distance off I glimpsed this callow, raw-boned gawk standing at the edge of a field. To speak truth I might not have noticed him at all, would not have noticed him at all—well you know the people, how they partake in their very aspect of the landscape itself, seeming as much to belong there as the scrawny trees against which they lounge for shade, as much a part of it as the clayish soil which hides their boots (the pun intended of course; what else has an exile like myself to do than make word games?), dry and dusty as the leaves, more like a sort of crop than a sort of man—if it had not been for the fact that he must have heard me coming even before I spotted him and snapped to with an alacrity which would have been alarming had it not been so dextrous and, well, practiced. When he whipped off his cap and bowed low as a serf in my direction. I swear, old friend, that even if I had not noticed the gesture, I would have heard its whoosh and snap two furlongs off. He startled me. He startled my horse, and I was already reining in, on the verge of a decision to turn to go back the way I had come lest he should prove a highwayman. What checked me was the thought that I had probably passed his confederates and, if I had, they would have done me, running me to ground like some damned fox. Why, by the very act of so suddenly reining in I had probably already lost the momentum I needed. Using my whip, I pressed the horse on and in that moment decided that if the murderous son of a bitch should take but one step out into the road I would run him down.
But damn me, old friend, if the worthy not only did not take that step but held his bow and scrape like some foppish frozen commissionaire till I had passed. This was two furlongs, mind. In that field he looked at once like some sculpture of rural servility and a piece of organic camouflage. Well. He was there the next day, not in the same field of course—he was no shirker—but the next one over. When he bowed in that way and flourished his cap he might have been a border guard of some picturesque country famous for its wines say, not so much questioning credential as already recognizing it two furlongs off and—I cannot say waving one on; he never moved a muscle after that ridiculous show of moving them all at once—seemed to encourage me past some imaginary finish line that could have been his own bent being. And there the next. And the next. Always advancing, mind, daily breaching the front lines of his tasks. And now I was deliberately slowing the horse, bringing it down from the full-out gallop of that first startled day to a canter the second and then to a walk and finally to a sort of lazed limp. I wanted to see how long he would hold that servile pose. It was scientific. (I have to have more than puns and word games; I have to have human nature itself, in nothing like the abundance in which it thrives in London of course. That’s understood. That’s given. Oh, soon shall I have to quit this lumpen, oafish exile and return once again to civilization! I swear it to you, I positively envy the bearer of this letter!) Not could, would. Could he could have done forever. It was would I was interested in.
We had left my fields long ago and for some time now had been on the land of tenant farmers working for the country’s greatest landowner, a gross Dutchman whose family cannot have been in England over a hundred years. His holdings are, as I have indicated, immense. Armies of peasants work for him. As always, the strange boy preceded me, those two constant furlongs fixed as if they had been struck off by surveyors’ sticks and levels, as if I were one end of the reading and he the other.
At this most lackadaisical pace the horse and I had assumed, I had some hope of catching the young man’s eye. I seemed to see him staring at me, his eyes fixed on mine as if I led a procession, but whenever we came abreast he looked away, his face in my direction but the eyes off center, gazing elsewhere so that his features took on the marked, pinched ones on a blind man’s face. One day I even tipped my hat to him. He blushed but made no more response than that involuntary one of his blood. On another day I bid him hello. The blush went deeper but I got no answer. My God, I thought, he’s mute.
You have never had the pleasure of being in my country, though I know I have invited you—I invite you now—nor do I scold so much as condone your decision to stay put in town. That is where all proper gentlemen properly belong, but if you ha
d come here you would have seen that it is all a gerrymandered fiction of contiguity. Farmers, even real farmers like the dumb Dutchman I alluded to above, live miles from their holdings like absentee landlords, so as we moved deeper and deeper into the Dutchman’s hectares we were coming closer and closer to my own home.
Which is where on the last day of our strange courtship he was waiting for me.
I had not even got down from the cabriolet when the piece of goods straightened and approached me. I cannot say that his hat was in his hands, I cannot say where it was. These humble types have a way with their hats (and with their hands too I shouldn’t wonder). Why I remark this at all is that for days now he had been playing the milepost for me as I rode by and now his deference seemed as absolute as an act of aggression. If he had stepped out into the road that first day to halt my progress I could not have been more alarmed. Yet apparently he meant no harm, for all he did once he approached was done with an appropriate respect and shyness.
“Sir,” says he, and so awkward as positively to seem to be directing his remarks into the horse’s behind. “Sir, er, ah, uh,” he says as if trying out strange new vowels he’d learned. “Squire…”
“Yes,” says I. “What is it?”
“I am a good worker,” says the brute.
“You are certainly excellent at finding the edge of a field and planting yourself in it,” says I.
“You may ask Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones or any of them. I am a good worker.”
“Yes, well, I congratulate you,” says I, and remind him, “yet it is only what God expects of all of us.”
“But, sir, I am no farmer,” he says with some warmth.
“No,” says I, “you are a scarecrow.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. What is it you want?”
“To be your coachman. To drive your coach.”
“What, this?” say I, indicating the topless, two-wheeled, one-horse carriage in which I sat.
“Yes, sir.”
“You are a coachman?”
“I would be,” says he, “oh, squire, I would be!”
“Then must you first study your trade and learn to recognize what a coach exactly is.”
In brief, old friend, he had no more idea as to the various sorts of vehicles that abound in his profession than I had regarding the whereabouts of his hat.
I told him I was a busy man. I told him he must go to the blacksmith and there make inquiries about the kinds of conveyances there be. I told him he must go to the inns and taverns along the post roads and there observe them. I told him he must undertake to learn what he could of harness and tack. “Why it is as necessary that you brief yourself in these matters,” I told him, “as for a sailor to learn about ropes and rigging, sails and stars.” Then, bethinking myself of you, I thought to add that if he could successfully demonstrate to me that he had become possessed of at least the basics of his would-be profession, I had an acquaintance in London who ran the most important public hack and livery system in all of England to whom I might recommend him.
Naturally I thought never to see him again.
He was back within the week, his mouth stuffed with definition, speaking so blithely of barouche, phaeton and sociable, buckboard, calashe, brougham and droshky that one would have thought he was as accustomed to equipage as he was to the very straws he sucked on. We went to my stables, where he challenged me as to the wisdom of using a particular thickness of harness on an animal whose feet had been shod with a certain shape of nail.
We went for a ride in the cabriolet. He drove. Brilliantly.
Of course I am reluctant to foist upon you someone whom you may not absolutely require, yet I did give my word and as the fellow, on the evidence, at least seems teachable, I overreach myself to the point that, amateur though I may be as to the requirements of the London livery trade, I send you an aspirant I have every reason to believe is one upon whose loyalties you may absolutely rely and who may, at the very least, do you some good on the new broad avenues of Regent Street.
In the hope that we may all soon meet again in the shining city, and in the further hope that such reunion prove propitious and jubilant, I remain ever your servant and now procurer …
The country’s greatest landowner?
A gross Dutchman whose family cannot have been in England over a hundred years?
The King read and reread the prolix letter.
The pun intended? What pun? What word games? What had he missed? Why had he grown so old?
Exile? Exile?
George Mills waited while the King read.
Waited patiently. No: humbly. No: proudly. No: all atwitter. No: all of them. All of them all at once. Not one time thinking, He’s going to do something for me. Not one time.
While the King read and reread, while he examined the anomalies and ambiguities, while he pored over the double Dutch double entendre, the political acrostic he took the letter to be. But the man is dead, he thought. Discovered and assassinated they told me. The most important public hack and livery system in all of England and all its jarvey spies and post-boy plotters shut down, under new management. (The wonder of their plain arrangements! King George thought. They had simply to overhear my clerks and ministers as they drove them down Pall Mall or along the embankment. And spring and summer the best time for spying they told me, during the mild weather, the carriage windows open to the breezes, and our Stuart enemies all ears on a fine day. Secrets lost to the warm front, to balm and ease. Very Nature a co-conspirator.) Not even understanding all of it, confused by their complicated shenanigans, by all held historical grudge, devotees, faction, the partisan life and the boring obsession of blood. Blood, he thought. Blood and milk. He didn’t care a damn really. It was simply inconvenient to abdicate. And he would miss a king’s perks. He had to admit. The handsome expense account, the lovely tributes. But I don’t understand my enemies! The pains they take, the troubles and lengths they go to. And why would they send me this, this aspirant? (Yet his mind nagged: It could be a mistake; I could be attributing to machination what perhaps ought to be put down to the simple disfigurement of style.) Still, he thought, I suppose I have to resist. Who’s King here anyway?
And Mills not only not thinking: He’s taking too long, he’s probably going to do something for me. But not even thinking: He’s taking too long, he’s probably going to do something to me.
The King looked up from the letter Mills had shown him and, seeing the expression of sly puzzlement on the young man’s face, mildly asked, “What?”
“Oh, sir,” George said, reddening, evasively shrugging.
“What?” he repeated.
“Well it’s just …”
“What? It’s just what?”
“What you told me. You know. All those things. About yourself.”
“Didn’t I also say that our nasty stories neither ascend nor descend but stay within their class of origin?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir, you did.”
“Well,” the King said, “there you are. It would seem you’re one of us then, George.”
“Oh, sir. You’re teasing me, ain’t you, sir?”
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 …”
&n
bsp; “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.
George Mills Page 46
