His Majesty’s lamentations continued for some hours until we decided that he should be gagged again to grant a spell of sleep to those of us who had given up their rest that evening. When we gathered in the morning, I insisted that Her Majesty, the Queen, be present as it was clear to me that she knew far more useful information than any of those attending to the King.
Warren disagreed with me on this point, saying after breakfast that day.
“Her Majesty is far too close to this to be objective. She wants to believe that the King is merely suffering from a little episode of some malady or another. That it may be a terrible and permanent illness isn’t within her ability to accept,” he said with an icy chill.
Had I not seen His Majesty’s altered state, I might have accepted his logic. Had I not seen the candlelight twist and warp into those eerie skeletal fingers, I might have concurred and been silent. Had I not felt that night what I had so often felt in cases where an ethereal and otherworldly foe presented itself, I might have thought his protests had some merit. As it was, I was merely astonished and disappointed in Warren’s closed mind.
“What do you believe it was you saw last night, Doctor Warren?” I asked.
“Nothing that can’t be explained by reason. It’s only a function of things that we don’t know that fuel your superstition,” Warren spat back at me.
“Superstition,” I sighed. “I am an Oxford man and I dare say that I have learned our language as well as one can. Superstition means to me that I have a baseless belief in something beyond the natural world. That I have a broad view of what is part of our natural world, isn’t superstition. It’s experience.”
Warren shook his head repeatedly and scoffed at me.
Our joint discussion with the Queen was far more productive. She explained at some length what had befallen Octavius, their young boy who passed away from the pox at the age of four. I recalled the event at the time in the year 1783, falling the same year as the defeat at the hands of the American colonists and their French and Spanish allies. Truly it was a dark time for the King and the kingdom. He had fallen ill at Kew Palace just to the southwest of London and died there.
It was a terrible story and one that, in conjunction with Her Majesty’s grief over the King’s descent into lunacy, must have been far too terrible for her to bear. I worried that we would inadvertently create another lunatic by extracting such painful memories. I decided to declare our course of action before any further damage could be done to the Queen’s state of mind.
“It would be for the best if we took the King to Kew to try to root out this disturbance,” I declared. “I believe, based on my past experience, that there may be a spirit haunting him from a site of great tragedy. It would not be without precedent.”
Sir Lucas nodded while Sir George gave me an uneasy look. Doctor Warren, predictably, scoffed at the suggestion. Her Majesty, however, quickly interceded before any disagreement could occur.
“Yes, yes. Please! If that vill bring this to an end, please go!” she cried. “Go today if you must!”
Greville stepped forward from the opposite wall in the dining room and bowed at the Queen.
“Is that an order, Your Majesty?” he inquired.
“Yes! Yes, it’s an order!”
“Her Majesty is responsible for decisions pertaining to His Majesty’s care while His Majesty is indisposed,” Greville announced. “I therefore will arrange for transport to Kew palace straight away.”
A terrible scene unfolded in the courtyard at Windsor in the midst of a fairly dreadful snow where His Majesty, upon learning that our destination was to be Kew, kicked and struggled violently. My sons fitted the King in a leather restraining jacket, which was heavily laden with buckles and locks to keep the King’s arms in place.
“KEW?!” he screamed. “No! Not Kew!”
“Your Majesty, your doctors thought it best to—” Greville tried to explain.
“You’re taking me away! Away to have my limbs ripped off by horses and my genitals thrown to pigs!” the King wailed. “And poor Octavius! Octavius! Octavius!”
I tried to never indulge His Majesty in his lamentations as reinforcing a patient’s calls for help only encourages more such behaviour. In that case, however, I made an exception.
“Your Majesty,” I spoke softly, “this is for your own peace of mind.”
He looked at me with tears welling in his eyes, which were red and irritated with crusty discharges that had not been cleared away from his lids or eyelashes.
“They’ll do it to me again. They’ll do it to me again,” he whimpered as he sank to his knees in the snow. He then curled up upon the ground and rocked back and forth, snow covering his face and hair. “Kew is where… is where…”
“I know, Your Majesty. That is why we must go. I can only promise you that once this is over, you shall know peace,” I attempted to assure him. “There will be more pain before it is all over.”
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My sons lifted His Majesty into the carriage where I am told he simply rested, sobbing in his sleep, on the journey to Kew.
Never before had I any reason to know anything about Kew Palace. I confess that I had only once or twice thought of it before attending to the King. It was a lovely enough estate with a great white stone house as its crown jewel. Its rooms were spacious and tastefully decorated in pastel colours with ample windows to create a brighter setting than the somewhat dreary halls of Windsor Castle. For that reason alone Kew would have been an improvement in any case.
When we arrived, we established His Majesty, seated in his restraining chair, in the dusty great hall and decided to create an air of normality by feeding him a lunch of heavily salted soup and plain bread without butter. I have found, for whatever reason, butter to be an irritant for already strained tempers. It does not do a mind well to indulge in pleasing flavours.
Initially, I had to feed the King his soup, putting the pewter spoon right up to his mouth and waiting for him to, under protest, consume it. On the first sip, he spat it into my face. The hot broth scalded my skin and dripped into my eyes, but I did not relent. It was important to establish that he could not act in whatever way he pleased. He still spat upon me the second time I tried to feed him. By the third, however, he relented and consumed his soup.
Once I was done, Doctor Warren, who had been waiting impatiently in the hall observing this spectacle of regal delinquency, accosted me.
“And just what was the point of all of that?” he asked. “I thought you were trying to root out strange spirits from beyond, not feed His Majesty soup.”
“For the inexperienced,” I began with deliberate condescension that fueled Warren’s ire, “one might not recognize the need to calm the patient’s mind so that they can properly combat these malign influences. Those primal and malicious elements that haunt our world seek out those of weak minds to corrupt and enlist in their efforts”
“And the King is one of those weak minds?” Warren queried, laughing.
I glanced back toward the King in his restraints and nodded.
“It would be a lot easier to just write off the King as a lunatic, elevate the Prince of Wales as regent, and be done with this whole bloody mess,” Warren scoffed.
“And it would be wrong. The King can be cured!” I insisted.
Sir Lucas traipsed past us as we argued. He turned to give a stiff nod.
“I quite agree, Doctor Willis! I quite agree!” Sir Lucas chirped.
Sir George followed behind, waddling and relying on his cane to a great extent. His undulating girth made balancing a precise feat of dexterity and one he managed well.
“Gentlemen,” he nodded as he pushed on. “Dinner will be at just past seven.”
I could not help but find Sir George’s fixation on sustenance amusing given his build, but any moment of levity was welcome at that time.
We had brought a squad of guards with us to Kew so that it was not only the doctors and attendants. Nonetheless, the palace felt as empty as my fields in Lincolnshire. After dinner, I again observed His Majesty throughout the evening. I observed that nighttime made his malady worse as he tried to fight off sleep. At first I assumed that this was, like so many lunatics, because he feared his own dreams. There is nothing like the horrors that a deranged mind will unleash in its dream life. I have had lunatics attempt to kill themselves upon waking for that very reason.
It became clear to me that other occurrences were afoot. I walked about the perimeter of the palace’s interior that night alone to collect my thoughts on how to proceed. I knew not what precisely I was looking for at Kew. Sir George even questioned me as to why we were at Kew as a general proposition.
“But His Royal Highness’ remains are at Westminster Abbey!” Sir George had insisted to me earlier in the evening. “Surely logic would dictate that his spirit would be restless there.”
“Sir George, one learns as a clergyman that the body is a vessel for the soul only so long as the body lives,” I reminded him. “Once mortality takes our body, the soul is free.”
“Free to go to Heaven,” Baker repeated with the comfort that only ignorance can grant a man.
“Not always,” I riposted.
I had learned that, due to Octavius’ age, there had not been the traditional period of mourning granted to those who would pass over the age of fourteen. As such, beyond a ceremonial burial at Westminster Abbey, the unfortunate Octavius was given a treatment not dissimilar from a stillbirth. I considered those circumstances again and again as I traversed the halls of Kew.
Then, a hand fell upon my shoulder. I startled.
“Father,” my son John said, leading the other two behind him. “I think the King is asleep now.”
Recovering my breath, I nodded and motioned that they could walk with me.
“He’s still babbling in his sleep, though,” Thomas chuckled.
“Is he saying anything intelligible?” I asked.
“It’s not Welsh again, if that’s what you mean,” Thomas laughed again.
“Like you would even know if it were,” Robert sighed.
“I know it’s English!” Thomas protested.
“As if one could call your attempts to utilize our idiom ‘English’,” Robert grumbled contemptuously, as he was wont to do.
“Boys, I beg of you, not now,” I groaned. “Try to be more respectful of one another when we are even barely in His Majesty’s presence. Restoring some sense of propriety to the King’s surroundings is good for him.”
“But—” Thomas whined and I immediately cut him off.
“Not another word!” I scolded them.
When we walked past a hearth in a secondary reception room, I heard what sound like a piercing wind coming down through the hearth. I stopped to listen to it as I was curious how it was that such a sound could be coming down into that room on such an otherwise still night.
“Father, what is it?” John asked.
“Quiet. Do you hear that?” I asked.
It was an indistinct howl at first, no different than wind blowing through a hole in a fence. Then it sounded more like a wailing. A woman’s wailing in fact.
“Heeeeennnnnnnooooooo,” the wailing high-pitched voice called out. “Heno yw eich nossssonnnnnn.”
I heard Robert gasp behind me. The other two boys and I all turned toward Robert, whose face drooped and shook. Even in the scarcely visible light availed to us at that moment, I could see the tortured contours of his face.”
“Tonight is your night,” he muttered mournfully. “Tonight is your night.”
“What?” John scoffed. “Who is even saying that?”
Robert looked toward the windows where a milky white figure glared at us before gliding past. My heart leapt against my chest. A total silence fell over Kew Palace at that moment. Not one of us breathed.
Nothing.
“HENO YW EICH NOSON!” the sepulchral voice lashed at my ears. I jumped where I stood.
Robert whimpered, tears running down his face.
“Banshee,” he muttered, his teeth chattering. “Banshee.”