Mrs. Queen Takes the Train

by William Kuhn

  “What, a stable?”

  “I’ve told you more than enough already.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll e-mail me soonest and tell me what’s up.” He flashed her an ironic appeal.

  “We’ll see.”

  His “Goodbye” had to be addressed to her back, because she was already running out toward the iron gate onto Piccadilly, taking long strides in her knee-high boots. He took out his phone and sent her an e-mail saying, “Whatever it is, I can help.” Then he shoved the phone back into his pocket and turned with a sigh to go back to work.

  Once she’d seen Elizabeth, fed her the cheese, and chatted briefly with Rebecca, The Queen turned to go back to the palace. Wearing Rebecca’s hoodie, she approached the door she’d come in by which would take her back via a gravel path through the gardens. In between the time of her arrival, and her turning to go, however, two workmen had come in to paint the door. “Sorry, love, not out this way. Not while it’s wet,” one of them said to her when she approached the door from the Mews. “You’ll have to go out into the road over there and get back inside through The Queen’s Gallery.”

  The Queen found it odd that the man had called her “love.” No one called her that. It set her back on her heels for a moment. Then she put her hands into the pockets of the hoodie, felt the cigarettes, penknife, and banknote that were there, and suddenly recalled that this was not her coat. It was Rebecca’s. Her hood was up, so the workmen hadn’t recognized her. That’s why they were so familiar. “Not rudeness, Little Bit. They call all old women ‘love,’ don’t they? Don’t jump to conclusions,” she murmured to herself.

  So she turned and did as she was told. She walked out via the main entrance to the Mews into Buckingham Palace Road. There two red tourist buses roared by her, splashing oily water onto the pavement, unaware of the major tourist attraction right in front of them. The Queen felt a brief moment of elation. She was so rarely on the street by herself, unrecognized. Here was all the busy world rushing by. Everyone seemed to have a place to go in a hurry: taxis, pedestrians bent double against the wind, and lorries. No one gave her so much as a second glance. It was marvelous. Why shouldn’t she have a place to go too? It suddenly occurred to her. Rebecca had mentioned that the Mews didn’t have a reliable supply of the cheese. Theirs was nearly all gone. It came from Paxton & Whitfield in Jermyn Street. Why shouldn’t she go and get some? She didn’t think it was far. And, come to think of it, why not Scotland itself? Earlier, she’d idly checked the railway timetable on the computer in her sitting room, telling herself it was time she learned how the public railway worked. Trains seemed to go rather frequently in the early evening. Why not Britannia?

  She had been used to following the rules since she was a little girl. She always did as she was told. She’d been taught that it was her job as a constitutional monarch always to stick to the program, to follow the Government’s advice, to adhere to the timetable, to act according to precedent. For most of her life she’d done that, and been rewarded for it. The monarchy had been reasonably popular. Playing by these rules, however, had not saved her from the disasters that had befallen the monarchy at the time of the breakup of the Prince and Princess of Wales. What’s more, she’d been blamed for much of what happened. “Her Majesty a Wicked Mother-in-Law,” “No Hugs for Diana from Queen,” “Cold Palace Shuts Out People’s Darling.” That’s what the papers had said. As far as she knew, republican and openly antimonarchical feeling was relatively rare in modern British history. There had been a little in the 1870s, when people wanted to see Queen Victoria out-of-doors more often. There was a lot more expected if Britain had lost the First World War, which didn’t happen, thankfully. So the anger and hatred that hit her square in the face after Diana died was something entirely new to her. She’d carried on as usual, of course, but things were not the same. She knew that part of what she was feeling now, whatever it was, maybe just something all old ladies suffered from, was also a kind of delayed reaction to the annus horribilis—all her children’s marriages breaking up at once, Windsor burning, a bungled announcement about payment of tax—and all that had followed from it. She’d internalized the shock, stored it up, and now she was suffering. The combination of the sadness, and the sense that doing as she’d always done hadn’t helped anyone when the crisis came, least of all her, made her ready all of a sudden to do something she’d never done before: to walk away from the palace on her own.

  The Queen set off in the direction of Green Park. She knew where Jermyn Street was. She and Margaret had been allowed by Nanny to walk up and down there when they were little, looking at the shop windows. It had been a long time since she’d been there, but she did know the way. So The Queen passed by The Queen’s Gallery, turned left in front of the palace, and walked by the big memorial to Queen Victoria on the other side of the road. She came to a crossing that would let her into the park opposite and looked curiously at a yellow button on a pole. What did that do? She pressed it. Miraculously the light changed and the traffic slowed to a halt so she could cross the road. What a surprise. That was handy, wasn’t it? She walked across, giving the drivers who’d stopped for her a little wave. She then went up the gravel path at the end of Green Park toward a gate she knew to be just behind St James’s Palace. If she found that gate, if she remembered the streets aright, she could find her way into Jermyn Street.

  The Queen felt the swell of excitement from doing something unusual. She had been on her own in front of the palace on only a handful of occasions. On VE day in 1945, she and Margaret had gone outside the iron railings with some other officers and stood with the crowds chanting “We want the King!” At first she’d pulled down her peaked cap over her forehead so no one would recognize her, but one of the boys with them, a fussy Grenadier, had refused to be seen with her if she weren’t wearing her uniform in the regulation way. So she had to put the cap on properly. Still, no one had known who she was. They had shouted and shouted until Papa and Mummy had come outside on the balcony to wave. How funny it was to see the whole performance from the stalls instead of from the stage. They’d gone out again on VJ day in August and got away with it several times more that summer, princesses pretending to be just girls in the crowd.

  Then, in 1986, when Andrew had married Sarah Ferguson, at the end of the wedding breakfast, as the newlyweds were driving away in their carriage, a great crowd of grandchildren had run after them from the inner quadrangle into the palace forecourt. If she hadn’t run after them to grab their hands, all those grandchildren would have run out into the street. There she’d been, sixty years old, running along in her heels with her jacket flapping, but she had to admit, that was ripping as well.

  Now with her hood up, the rain mixed with sleet, and the wind moving the big wet branches of the plane trees, she felt in a holiday mood. She loved wet weather, and a storm always cheered her up. She could recall being in a California rainstorm with the Reagans one afternoon when they were driving her up a hillside to their ranch in Santa Barbara. The President wanted to show her his horses. She liked him. He might not have been all that bright, but certainly he was the most charming of all the American presidents she’d met. The rain came down in buckets and the mud flowed down the gravel road. Mrs Reagan twisted her handkerchief and wailed about the luncheon being ruined. “Nonsense!” The Queen remembered telling her. “It’s an adventure!” She meant it. A good storm was always exciting. It was also The Queen’s instinct as a farmer, the owner of many thousands of arable acres, that wet weather more often than not was a good thing. So she bustled up the gravel path with the wet boughs tossing overhead and scanned the opposite wall for the gate she was sure was there somewhere.

  Attempting to allay the misery that was clearly in the younger man’s eyes, William said airily to Luke, “I imagine Madam’s just gone to find a few biscuits for the doggies. They like them with their tea. Little thugs that they are.”

  “No, really gone. At least hal
f an hour now.”

  “Gone where? I thought she had an evening in?”

  “She was meant to. But I stopped by around half past three to see whether she needed anything before I buggered off for the afternoon, and she wasn’t here. Door to terrace open. Dogs wandering about. No one knows where she is. I telephoned security and they think she’s in here. I ran around the garden just now to try and find her. Not there. Telephoned St James’s and Windsor, even Sandringham. Not there either.”

  “The Duke of Edinburgh?”

  “In Brazil. To promote the World Wildlife Fund. Left this morning. Not back for two weeks.”

  William looked at him gravely and after a moment asked, “Well, we call the police, don’t we?”

  “No, we certainly do not. Do you want the Metropolitan Police to know that The Queen of England is wandering around unattended in the rain? What will that say to them about her? About us? And when the newspapers find out? Alzheimer’s will be the mildest of their headlines, I can tell you. Are you daft? We cannot tell the police.”

  “I expect she’s gone walkabout.”

  “Don’t speak to me in riddles at a moment like this.”

  William caught Luke’s weariness and frustration, but he didn’t particularly like being talked to as if he were just playing about. He saw in a moment the seriousness of the situation.

  “Well, if you did a little reading as well as playing polo and lying in sunbeds, you might know that old aborigines go walkabout when they’re getting ready to die. It’s in Bruce Chatwin’s book.”

  This was too much for Luke: the suggestion that not only was she gone, and gone on his watch, but that The Queen might have gone somewhere to die upset him more than he’d been upset when William came walking in the room. He folded his arms on the desk, put down his head, and sobbed. He couldn’t stop himself. He knew he cried more often since coming back from the war, but knowing that didn’t help him to prevent it.

  “Oh God! The big strong ones are always like this. Weak as kittens in a crisis.” William’s instinct was to fill up the space in the room in order to cover the young man’s embarrassment. But Luke himself seemed to be without shame. One of the dogs came over to lick a bit of exposed skin between the top of his sock and the bottom of his trouser leg. “Come now, sir, we’re going to go and find her, aren’t we?” William put his hands lightly on Luke’s shoulders. “We’re going to have a look-see. We’ll have her back here in a pair of pumps and tiara, ready to receive, in twenty-four hours, won’t we?”

  It was the first time Luke had been touched by a man in a very long time. He lifted up his head. “How?” he asked as if he were a petulant child speaking to a parent.

  “Well, I’m sure that we can piece something together, can’t we? She didn’t say she wanted to go somewhere, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t tell me anything. You?”

  “Nor me.”

  “I found this railway timetable on her computer,” Luke said, blowing his nose on a crusty handkerchief he extracted with difficulty from his trouser pocket. He hit a button and brought the London King’s Cross timetable back up on the screen.

  “Trains to Edinburgh Waverley,” said William, reading the screen. “Go to Scotland and die. Yes, it would kill me if I had to live up there.”

  “I fancy she rather likes it. Would stay up there longer if she could.”

  “Oh yes, they all love it up there. Wear their kilts all the time. They take it a bit far, if you ask me.”

  “Well, I think we’ve got to go after her.”

  “After her where? To Edinburgh? It’s four and a half hours by train! And what do we do when we get there?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s my job to look after her and I’m going,” Luke said, standing up from the desk and looking for some assent from the man who’d just touched his shoulders.

  William hesitated. This was definitely outside the line of duty. He liked Luke, but he’d intended to keep their relationship on a basis of distant flirtation. He was thrown off balance by the proposition that they should go to Scotland together.

  “Yours too,” said Luke.

  “Mine too what?”

  “Your job to look after her too.”

  William signified a qualified assent with a ragged sigh. “But I’m not going anywhere, especially with you, without my dark glasses. And let’s not rush off half-cocked. The Queen sometimes walks over to the Mews of an afternoon. Have you tried over there? What about Shirley MacDonald? Not much escapes her. Have you interviewed her?

  “No, neither one,” said Luke, his posture slumping with the admission that these might be two critical sources of information if they were going out to look for Her Majesty.

  “Is that what they teach you at Sandhurst? Prepare to attack with no reconnaissance first? Look splendid in your gear, don’t you, but I must say the intelligence gathering on this operation is distinctly slipshod.”

  Luke marveled at William’s ability to tease him in the midst of a crisis. How did he manage to keep his wits about him? “I believe Mrs MacDonald and Lady Anne Bevil are both stopping in the palace tonight, ready for The Queen’s early start tomorrow. We might go and speak to them.”

  “Oh no. Shirley MacDonald is not telling what she knows to some toffee-nosed boy. I’ll go and speak to them, young fellow me lad. You deal with the Mews. Look smart. Meet up back here in twenty minutes.”

  Without so much as goodbye, or a further kind word, William was out the door.

  Although Rebecca was on fairly easy terms with The Queen, The Queen’s private office was another story. The Mews seldom dealt with the private secretaries except on arrangements for ceremonial occasions, and then they were certainly terrifying. The equerries were chosen by The Queen’s private office even though their name, “equerry,” pronounced “eh-KWHER-ry” went back to horses. It derived from the French écurie, for stable. Sometime in distant history the equerries were officers in charge of the stables. Nowadays they sometimes arranged for transportation in cars, on trains, and by airplane, almost never on horseback, so Rebecca in the Mews knew of them, but she had little to do with them. Their proximity to The Queen made them rather arrogant when she did have to deal with them, so the phone call from Luke calling her over to the palace made her nervous.

  Luke had worked out that William had served her lunch in her study after one and that was the last anyone inside the palace had seen of her. He telephoned the Mews to see whether she had gone over there after lunch. Rebecca had picked up Luke’s call and confirmed that The Queen had been there earlier in the afternoon. He asked her whether she’d walk over to have a word with him in The Queen’s sitting room. He gave her instructions on how to find it. She’d never been in it before. She appeared after having run over from the Mews. She was out of breath. Her riding boots were splattered with mud.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” said Luke, standing up from The Queen’s desk. “How do you do?” He nodded her in the direction of the comfortable chair. He did not reach out to shake her hand. If Rebecca were breathing heavily from her run, he was thoroughly distracted by the enormity of what was before him. “Look,” he began right away without trying to smooth things over, as the upper levels of the Household usually did by asking her about what she was doing. It was their cover for being about to ask her to do some significant and time-consuming job. Luke, however, went straight to the point. “Her Majesty has disappeared. Before the police and the secret services are alerted, I’d like to try to find her quickly myself. The papers will make a fuss if they know she’s walked off hors de routine, as it were. It might injure her. I’d like to keep it quiet as long as we can. But that means we have to find her before anyone else does. So there’s not much time. She came to the Mews this afternoon, did she?”

  “Yes,” she said and gave him an angry look.

  “And?”

  “And
nothing. She often comes over. She had some cheddar for Elizabeth. She likes it.”

  “Cheddar cheese?”

  “Yes, Elizabeth likes it.”

  After a split second of confusion, Luke gathered Rebecca was referring to a horse, rather than the sovereign. He would have been rather taken aback if she’d addressed The Queen by her Christian name. He also gathered that this young woman was as upset about something as he was, possibly the disappearance of The Queen, possibly something else. “Her Majesty make any peculiar remarks?”

  “Well, she wasn’t dressed for the weather. Only a headscarf on. It was pelting down outside. I gave her my hoodie.”

  “Your hoodie?”

  “She had no coat. She needed something.”

  Luke waved this away. “She say anything?”

  “She asked if I thought horses were ever sad.”

  “Oh Lord,” Luke groaned.

  Rebecca put in defensively, “Well, they’re sometimes not as contented as they might be. And she likes talking about that. Is all.”

  “Yes, I see. But don’t you think she might have been talking about herself too?”

  Rebecca’s focus with The Queen was always on what they both cared about, the horses, not on each other. Whatever it was that had made Her Majesty turn up earlier that afternoon was far too personal to be sharing with this man in a grey suit. She just pursed her lips and made no response.

  “Look, I don’t like asking these sorts of questions any more than you like answering them. Why is it so hard to get people in this bloody place to pull together? If you and I don’t make common cause and find out where she has gone to, they’ll be very rough with her. Don’t you see?” He paused to see if she would volunteer any more useful news.

  She did not. She looked over his shoulder out the darkened window.

  “William thinks she’s not herself. Has gone . . .” he couldn’t say “walkabout” to this unresponsive girl with high color and muddy boots, “to get ready to, um, die.” He’d blurted out the word before he’d had a chance to think.