Artful comments
When the unlettered sneer—and they always do, poor things, because ignorance so often masquerades as wit—I am inclined to remind them, very gently, that the titles are quite real. Quite. One mustn’t be apologetic simply because half the descendants of the Round Table have lost their acreage gambling on sheep or marrying into vinegar. Titles, like good pearls, are not diminished by a century or two of neglect. They retain their lustre, provided one has the sense to polish them at intervals, or, failing that, the vanity to brag about them.
It was our most illustrious ancestor who began all this—the original Mallard, a fellow so energetic he makes poor King Arthur look practically suburban. When he “waged,” as he always put it (and what a Mallard word that is; no one else could turn perpetual warfare into a genteel verb), across Gaul, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, he did so not with a sword in each hand—though he might have liked the image—but with a sense of entitlement so unshakable that even dragons were said to have blinked in bewilderment before retreating into the mist.
Arthur himself, by all family accounts, was exceedingly fond of him, though Merlin is supposed to have described the original Mallard as “too confident by half, and the half remaining all conceit”. The remark, far from being taken as criticism, became a sort of household motto. There is a painting somewhere (probably above the housekeeper’s cupboard now) showing our Mallard seated at the Round Table between Gawain and a particularly sleek dragon, which he insisted was there only for scale.
Grandmama, who adored a scandal more than a sonnet, used to insist that Mab—the queen of dreams and distinctly fast company—visited him one midsummer’s night and pronounced that his offspring would henceforth be born with unmanageable hair and unmanageable ambition. Certainly, that prophecy has carried down the centuries quite faithfully.
The Mallards have, as you can imagine, always thought of themselves as Arthur’s “other” family—the ones who made everything work while the official ones were off being chivalric or doomed. There is even a family legend that Arthur, in an administrative moment, remarked that without the Mallards there would be no round table at all, as it was our ancestral carpenters who cut it into shape (though naturally they were never paid). Some naughty historian once called us “the footnotes of Camelot,” but we prefer to say we provided the punctuation.
In the early charters, fancifully illuminated with all manner of serpents, ducks, and sheep—apparently each beast had symbolic meaning, though it looked more like a farm catalogue—there are grants of land as far-flung as Aquitaine and Kent. Our ancestor, ever the organiser, set his sons, nephews, and yes, his loyal companions as princes, counts, and marquises of those regions. A few of the parchments survive, so brittle they disintegrate if one breathes on them too assertively. The seals, however, are exquisite; one features a stoic duck perched upon a sword hilt, gazing as though it would rather be elsewhere.
Did you imagine those crowns dropped from clouds or were handed about by cherubs? Hardly. The Mallards, with their painful practicality, granted them. And grant them they did, with the satisfied air of people offering things that were, in truth, already theirs.
Of course, time does dreadful things to grandeur. Yet, for all that, the names endure, varnished and revarnished by successive generations, each polishing them as tenderly as the hilts of their splendidly unused swords.
These days, there are fewer princes, more professors and a scattering of eccentric cousins in Tuscany. The titles, though, remain very much alive—breathed upon, embroidered into stories, told at dinner with the same seriousness once reserved for duels.
And so when outsiders—journalists, genealogists, Australians with doctoral theses—roll their eyes and ask if the Mallards were ever “real,” I can only laugh and reply, “Real? My dear, more real than reality itself. After all, Arthur’s own offspring died with legend; ours merely misplaced their castles.”
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