Despite the difficulty involved, we dragged the four dead soldiers’ remains back up to the top of Moel Famau and rejoined them with their comrades further down the slopes buried under the snow. We kept them together, all under the snow, until we could acquire a cart in Ruthin to bring them all back and give them a proper burial. The day before Christmas, Father James officiated, and their comrades gave moving eulogies.
We celebrated Christmas in Ruthin as we all recovered from our ordeals. I was happy to observe that the town seemed to be on the mend, the seeping madness from the banshee’s lair no longer actively affecting the people there. I should qualify to say that they were no longer afflicted as near as I could determine. I did not, of course, examine all nearly five hundred of them, after all.
At the end of mass, I granted to Father James the silver mirror on which our entire enterprise had depended. He stared at it and ran his finger across its rim several times.
“To think that the only thing that could destroy that evil fiend was her own gaze,” he quipped. “Someone must have known about that to have brought this down there so many years ago.”
I nodded.
“I don’t know if she has been vanquished in the past and if this is a permanent solution or not,” I mumbled in sorrow even thinking that this horror might one day return. “But, if it isn’t—”
“A fine addition to our vaults, then,” Father James interrupted, smiling. “I will add to our records accordingly. One of my successors decades or centuries from now might need to know.”
“I’ll make my own records, of course,” I said.
“But sadly they cannot be the official record,” he sighed. “It’s always important that the ordinary people not know precisely what lurks in the shadows, if they did and we officially acknowledged it, there would not be a soul in this kingdom who could sleep well.”
“There is truth in that,” I concurred. “I find that even moments of victory over these fiends never quite brings me peace. I know what still lurks out there.”
“And against them all, we stand vigilant, ever watchful,” he declared. Then he made the sign of the cross at me. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
“Amen,” we said in unison.
Mayor Cooper took the news regarding Cael Powys with a total lack of surprise, but also deep irritation. He wrote up the proclamation to be posted in the market square with great speed, fueled by wrath.
“So, he was causing a lot of this. I say good riddance, then,” the Mayor spat onto the floor next to his desk. “But, I am now out a constable and my clerk. And my notary, since Cael was both. Whatever your travails, Doctor Willis, these fiends have also wreaked havoc on the proper maintenance of municipal governance!”
I stood with my mouth agape.
“Is that truly all you are concerned about?” I inquired.
“Life marches on, doctor. Best not to dwell on things now firmly in the past,” he cheerily said while putting the finishing touches on his proclamation. “There. Now I have three appointments to keep before noon, so I must insist that you leave. Give His Majesty and the Prime Minister my best wishes. Oh, and thank you for helping Ruthin. I will have your name inscribed on a brick or some such thing. Off you go.”
And with that, we headed back to Kew Palace.
Upon our arrival three days later, we were greeted by Sir George and Doctor Warren, who cheered our success, albeit with a reservation. His Majesty was still deeply demented, even if it was not in the same manner as before.
“At least he’s stopped speaking that accursed Welsh!” Doctor Warren scoffed.
“I quite agree,” Sir George added. “It made understanding his complaints most difficult.”
When I stepped into the palace, I saw the King strapped to the restraining chair, though he was not violently resisting it. Greville at in a chair next to the King, silently watching His Majesty’s every moment.
“Ah, Doctor Willis,” Greville chirped, rising to greet me. “I knew when His Majesty had begun to improve that you must have been successful.”
“Improvement would appear to be a relative term,” I mumbled, glancing at the King. “Still, an ordinary lunatic is a far simpler matter. Is there any indication he remembers any of what happened while—”
“Hard to say,” Greville interjected. “His Majesty’s ramblings are still, shall we say, unintelligible for the most part. At least I am certain he is no longer speaking Welsh.”
I nodded and took to examining the King. He stared directly ahead to the broad south-facing windows. A few birds played about in the snow, fluttering and chirping at one another. His sores from cupping and blistering were healing up nicely and he seemed to refrain from pulling off bandages that wrapped his prior injuries. Small victories were always the first step toward recovery and I took up the remainder of His Majesty’s care with great optimism that he would be fully recovered within several weeks or at least a few months.
After the New Year, we took to trying to teach His Majesty to patiently read documents again. During the most demented throes of his madness, he would simply become frustrated and tear papers apart, wear books as hats, or spout obscenities about how he found the topics boring or the authors were somehow morally deficient. I shall not repeat the precise contents of His Majesty’s utterances as they were most distasteful. Little by little, we came to achieve some manner of stabilization and recovery.
Prime Minister Pitt visited us at Kew shortly after the New Year to impress upon us the political importance of His Majesty’s recovery. Charles James Fox and his reformist allies in Parliament pushed for the Regency Act to make the Prince of Wales Regent of the kingdom, with nearly all powers and prerogatives. As the Prince of Wales had far different leanings than His Majesty, that would mean a dismissal of Mr. Pitt’s government and likely the ascension of Charles James Fox as Prime Minister, a thought that horrified any sober decent English gentleman.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Time, Doctor Willis, isn’t on our side,” Mr. Pitt scolded me as we walked outside Kew Palace during an interlude in His Majesty’s treatment. It was an especially brutally cold January day and I would venture that the foul weather did not aid the Prime Minister’s temperament. “Do you understand this?”
“Prime Minister, with all due respect, your worries are misplaced,” I assured him. “I am certain that by the end of March, we will—”
“March?!” he shouted at me. “What makes you think we have that much time? Politics do not wait for medicine.”
“And yet all I can offer is medicine,” I quipped back.
Progress continued to be slow and steady throughout January. He allowed him some visits from the Queen come early February and Her Majesty was able to carry on a fairly normal conversation with him for perhaps ten minutes or so. Then, inevitably, he lapsed into various demented delusions. Recovery is not a straight path, I have always found with my lunatics. His Majesty is just a man, like any other, and his path to a temporary recovery was destined to be an uneven one.
Come late February, the political climate had escalated to a fever pitch as Parliament debated the Regency Bill. At one point, someone managed to present the text of the bill to His Majesty, which I feared would drive the King into a fit of rage that would set back his recovery by months. He did indeed fume over it, but in a coherent manner.
“The bill doesn’t matter, Your Majesty,” I said to him with a smile.
He nodded back at me with a broad grin.
“You’re right, Willis,” he chuckled.
He still had relapses, such as one episode when he claimed that he had stuffed the entirety of London into his pillowcase and that he would “Sleep on London until it behaved itself.” I have not even the flimsiest idea as to what he meant by that. Astonishingly, that was one of the more comprehensible statements from his relapses.
I found that his love of the Church and affinity for prayer sped his recovery far swifter than anything else. The comfortable routines and patterns of prayer provide a sound structure for any mind, troubled or not, and it was a regret of mine that I had not focused more on this sooner. For those residual traces of the curse that had been projected onto him from Clwyd, the prayers also served to suppress them, removing what ill effects they inflicted upon His Majesty.
Finally in March, we had a sustained period of lucid conversations lasting several hours where the King did not engage in any demented lines of discussion. For those who had been in his service in the past, they noticed the return of a verbal tendency that they associated so frequently with his more ordinary behaviour. As I had not previously been in His Majesty’s service, I did not know to expect this, and so it came as a shock to me when it happened.
“Ah, yes, Willis,” he announced as Greville escorted him in from a walk around the Kew Palace grounds. “Fine day out there, what what!”
“I beg Your Majesty’s pardon. What was that?” I inquired.
“I said that it was a fine day.”
“No, Your Majesty said something thereafter.”
The King glared at me with the utmost contempt.
“I didn’t say anything more. Maybe all those years as a mad doctor have led you to start hearing things, what what!”
Greville forced a smile at me and motioned for me to acquiesce. Once His Majesty went to the dining hall for lunch, Greville explained the situation to me.
“His Majesty is known to say ‘what, what’ or ‘hey, hey’ at the end of a great many of his sentences. It was the absence of him saying that which caused us to suspect something had gone horribly amiss last October,” he recounted wistfully.
“I see. Well, we should endeavour to correct that habit. It’s a sloppy excess that should be curbed and thwarted,” I declared.
Greville shook his head.
“I fear that would be a losing battle, Doctor Willis,” Greville giggled.
Indeed it was. Over the next few days, I must have heard those most astonishingly odd punctuations to his sentences the better part of a hundred times. In some ways, they were intoxicating to listen to and I found myself mimicking His Majesty inadvertently.
The House of Commons had actually passed the Regency Bill whilst we struggled with His Majesty’s malady, but Mr. Pitt and his allies in the House of Lords managed to snare up the bill long enough that the King’s recovery became a widely known and accepted fact. When he returned to London, the King addressed members of Parliament to thank them for all of their good wishes during his period of illness. The members’ jubilation, especially for Mr. Pitt and his allies, was overwhelming. I had never seen grown men dance and cry in joy like that.
We attended to His Majesty at Windsor for some time following his return to ensure that there were no other relapses. Mr. Pitt agreed to pay all of the doctors’ wages for a further month. When we provided our final joint bulletin, Mr. Pitt passed a bill providing for an annuity of one thousand pounds a year for myself and each of the other attending physicians. It was a lovely gesture of gratitude.
I wish I could claim that His Majesty offered me heartfelt words of gratitude as well after all I had been through, but I am afraid that such is not the manner of kings. His official duties soon made him quite busy again and I was told to return to Lincolnshire. When I was given that order, I returned Saint Augustine’s cudgel to its resting place at Westminster Abbey.
My medical comrades in confronting His Majesty’s illness, too, scattered to the wind without saying much of anything, save for Sir Lucas. He offered to refer more patients to my hospital in Lincolnshire and to consult me on any future matters pertaining to the less natural occurrences. For such an esteemed member of the Royal College of Physicians to offer his support was greatly beneficial to my practice.
All three boys and I returned to Lincolnshire in a cramped carriage. Thomas in particular could not stop talking about the honour of having met so many critical figures in the kingdom’s governance, including of course the King, Mr. Pitt, the Lord Chancellor Roger Thurlow, and many others. I feel that John had the appropriate reaction to Thomas’ incipient fawning sycophancy for those men.
“Not one of them is in the slightest bit remarkable,” John quipped. “They’re just men who happen, by birth or accident, to have gotten these positions. Really all very boring.”
“Boring?” Thomas shot back. “Very few ordinary people get to meet this lot and you call it boring?”
“After everything we have endured and observed, you find men like Pitt interesting?” Robert scoffed in condescension. “You never cease to amaze me, Thomas.”
Thomas poked at me to gain my attention, but I was lost in thought looking out the carriage window at the rolling green hills of Lincolnshire.
“Thomas, your brothers are right,” I interceded at last. “We have noble work to do back at our hospital and farm that should be the only thing that concerns us now.”
My dear wife had lovingly overseen the work of my farm for those months, hiring at only modest expense the necessary labourers to oversee the livestock and, of course, my patients. They had fully completed the repairs on the barn and had also planted all of the crops for the coming season. Upon review, I determined that nearly half of them had so mended during my absence that they were free to leave and live happy, full lives unburdened by their maladies.
As for myself, I took a more active role in that season’s farming duties than I had previously as I found it a worthy distraction from the horrors I had experienced both at Kew and in Clwyd. I knew that other episodes would arise in the future and those would again require my labours, but for that moment I was content to simply indulge in the calm around me.
So concludes my entries related to the so-called Regency Crisis of 1788-89. For the people of this kingdom, their minds focus on the lowly intrigue of the Prince of Wales and his allies in Parliament who tried to take advantage of His Majesty’s predicament. Any who read my preceding words will know the horrible truth of it, which is rightly kept secret from the masses. Were they to know who precariously balanced we are between our Age of Enlightenment and primal depravity, I fear that society would tear itself to pieces in fear. And they might be right to do so. I know not whether we will always emerge victorious. After all, I ascribe our victory over that red banshee to quite a great deal of luck. Had we failed, I cannot say with confidence another would have succeeded.
With that all in mind, I implore any who read this, as I shall implore myself, that this is a struggle that will have to be maintained for all time. God save the King. God save the Kingdom. God save us all.
~~~