Letters

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.