Madam President of Mack Enterprises sends her best wishes and her regrets, Cook replied, and produced a note to that effect from Jane: Frightfully busy with the business and with plans for her own wedding later in the month; love to us both, and her particular fond gratitude for my “loyal services” to her in the recent past. Oddly regal phrase! But then, just as I was about to put aside my ladyship, Jane was, so one understood, about to assume hers; and any such expression at once of gratitude and of remembrance was a happy rarity from that source.

What’s more, by way of wedding gift she offered us a week’s loan of yacht and skipper, all expenses paid — so Cook apprised us now — either immediately, for honeymoon, or at our later convenience. Finally, Cook had interceded on her behalf with the Maryland Historical Society to lend me one of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s gowns to be married in (not Mme B.‘s own wedding dress, which would fit only the daring 18-year-old who had shocked Baltimoreans by wearing “nearly nothing,” but a handsome green silk from her maturity, meant to impress the emperor’s family). It awaited my pleasure in the guest stateroom; our host hoped I might wear it to the luncheon, and that we would make use of that same stateroom for our wedding night.

I was touched (Cook, I should add, was now “almost certain” that he could not accept the Marshyhope appointment). Ambrose declined the wedding-night invitation: some thoughtful PR man for the Society to Restore the U.S.F. Constellation had been inspired to offer us the captain’s quarters of that historic vessel, he now informed me — an arrangement my groom thought would be, and I quote, “groovier”—but he and Magda both urged me to try the gown. His F. S. Key outfit, alas, was ashore, in the barracks being used for actors’ dressing rooms; he would don it after lunch. As for that honeymoon offer, we Would See (knowing who the yacht’s real owner was, Ambrose had of course no intention of accepting Jane’s gift; but he and I had not yet exchanged our guilty little secrets).

I needed no urging: the whole scene was so festive, as if all Baltimore celebrated our wedding! Besides, it was now noon: Ambrose and I had a certain schedule to maintain. Armed with champagne and teased by the party, we withdrew to “have a look at the gown,” I promising happy-teared Magda to call her in shortly for the fitting. B. & B. filmed our exit; Chaplain Beille liberally grinned; we winked as broadly as possible and shut the cabin door.

Sex #4. We’d been paying no mind, we realised, to the style of our coitions — trouble enough to keep to our timetable! #3, for example, ought to have been impossible: how couple in a manner representative of abstinence? Now it occurred to us, fleetingly, that this fourth coming together ought to be the “Marsha/marriage” one, though we were not yet wed… Oh fuck it, Ambrose said. Thank you, Marsha Horner!

Then we fetched Magda and Angie in to dress me — a touch snug, that gown of Betsy’s, but a smasher all the same — and went above for luncheon. Antipasto and Asti spumante, minestrone, cold melons and spumoni, all lightered across the harbour from Baltimore’s Little Italy by order of the (Italian-American) mayor, who would be joining us at the reception! Magda was in gastronomic heaven. Salutes to the bride-and-groom-to-be, including one from A. B. Cook oddly premonitory of your own: an alphabet toast handed down from the time of James II which had served as a code for Jacobites:

ABC! (A blessed Change!)

DEF! (Drive every Foreigner!)

GHI! (Get Home, [J]amie!)

KLM! (Keep loyal Ministers!)

NOP! (No oppressive Parliaments!)

QRS! (Quickly return Stuarts!)

TUW! (Tuck up Whelps!)

XYZ! (‘Xert your Zeal!)

Oh, well: the wine and prosciutto were first-rate.

After lunch the Constellation was towed back to its berth in the inner harbour; it was the time of day when, in 1814, Cochrane’s fleet had briefly moved in closer, and the gunners of McHenry had at last been able to return their fire. Baratarian’s role therefore was to move out into that position (Buck alone on board) and open up with the little brass “sunset gun” mounted on her coach roof; ours was to go ashore and make ready for the wedding ceremony whilst the fort’s cannoneers raised a happy racket and Angie held her ears. Now I espied Drew (with Merope’s ex-comrades Thelma, Rodriguez, et al., but not, I thanked heaven, with “Henri Burlingame”), cheerily manning a great 24-pounder. There was Todd Andrews — had he joined the Frames company? — in what looked to be serious cross-examination of a hostile witness: Merope Bernstein herself! Prinz looked on, bemused, from a safe distance, framing us and them with his fingers as in days gone by. No sign, thank heaven again, of J. B. Bray.

Now the big guns blasted away with their blank black-powder charges. Time for Ambrose to don his costume. Things were being filmed, he said, “not necessarily in sequence”—understatement of the season! As the full sunshine, for example, was apt for the Wedding scene but wrong for the rainy “twilight’s last gleaming” of 13 September 1814, we were pretending that today was tomorrow; tonight and tomorrow we would shoot today with the aid of fireboats and wind and rain machines. Certain scripted statements, too — not very meaningful to us lit’ry types — were delivered face-on to the camera, Godard-style, some of them by Author and Director standing shoulder to shoulder. E.g.:

AUTHOR:

This film begins with a shot of the opening pages of my novel.

DIRECTOR:

The novel opens with a sequence from my film.

Or:

AUTHOR:

And the Word shall have the last word.

DIRECTOR:

Cut.

DREW MACK:

The Novel is a cop-out. The Film is a cop-out. But the Movement is not a cop-out. Until now the media have killed us with accommodation. Now we will fight them on their grounds, with their weapons. We will make use of them without their knowing it—

DIRECTOR:

Cut.

And how about this, read by Prinz’s erstwhile protégée?

MEROPE:

The Author knows very little of the Movement; his rendering of it in the novel is naive, as is the Director’s rendering of the novel into film. But real revolutionaries can make use of such ingenuous mimicries.

Or, finally, this, delivered to me (Ambrose’s hands upon my shoulders) and meant to be the wrap-up shot not only of the Word-versus-Image theme but of the whole cockamamie film:

AUTHOR:

Make no mistake about it, my darling: We will have the final word! We will triumph over our natural enemy in—

The scene ended at the dash. I asked him where the last two words were. Oh, well, you see, he said, they’re to be superposed in block capitals on the film…

Enough of that, yes? Getting on to half after three now, and up we trip to the dressing-room barracks, where A. strips to become Francis Scott Key, transferring your unopened letter, of the existence whereof the bride has not yet been apprised, to the waistcoat pocket of his dandy Federal-period togs. Then — well, it’s that time again, and #5, R.I.P., was his Reign of Terror — before dressing he bends me forward over a barracks-bed footboard, ups B.P.B.‘s green gown and white petticoats and downs her drawers, and, his potency more than restored by that Asti spumante, merrily puts it to me (your indulgence, sir) like a ramrod up the breech.