by William Kuhn
“Die?” she said, momentarily shocked out of her determination not to share anything with him. “Die. She wasn’t dying. She was fine.”
“Yes, but perhaps was having some gloomy thoughts, and asked you whether horses had gloomy thoughts too?”
Now that he put it that way, it didn’t seem so odd. She had seemed somehow a little different than usual. “Well, she wasn’t what I would have called cheerful.”
“Said nothing to you about where she might be going after she left you?”
“No, just was going out into the weather, so she let me put my hoodie onto her.”
“Hoodie,” said Luke with a combination of incredulity and distaste. “Isn’t that what the boys wear on the street when they’re about to knife you? And you put one over Her Majesty’s head, did you?”
“Look, I wear one, and I don’t carry a knife.” This wasn’t strictly true. Rebecca did have a scout knife she kept in her pocket for small tasks. She didn’t carry it as a weapon. “Thank you. Is there anything else?”
God, she was difficult, Luke thought to himself. He left a pause to see whether it might allow her indignation to disperse a little. “And where might such a woman go, who was curious about whether horses were ever depressed, on a December afternoon?”
Rebecca saw that he would not allow her to go until she provided something more. She wished she knew what else she could tell him. The only thing she could really think of was that The Queen still found it funny that Elizabeth liked the cheddar. She’d told The Queen it came from Paxton & Whitfield, and that they’d run out of their supply at the Mews. Now, why wouldn’t she send someone out to get more if she wanted it? Or why not send Rebecca herself if it came to that, as she had done before? But if she were behaving oddly, which Rebecca could see for herself she was, mightn’t The Queen go to Jermyn Street to get the cheese herself? She was surprisingly unrecognizable in that hoodie. This thought flashed through her mind and she as quickly determined she wouldn’t tell the equerry. As a man, and as a member of the upper level of the Household, she simply didn’t trust him.
“I have no idea,” she said, separating the words so he could see she had determined to tell him nothing more.
“All right, then,” said Luke, defeated. “But here’s my mobile number in case you find out something. I am thinking of going to Scotland tonight. William too, possibly. Found a railway timetable on her computer screen.” He stopped a moment and caught her eye. “Please do let me know,” he said separating his words, imitating what she had just done, “will you, if you find out anything.”
“I will,” she said. It was the least brusque thing she’d said in the twenty minutes they were together. Something about the use of a Christian name in his sentence made her soften a little. She had no idea who “William” was, but he had now mentioned him twice. The equerry in his own way was as defiant as she’d been meeting his questions, and his breaking the usual spoken order of things had got her attention. Perhaps he wasn’t just a grey suit after all.
The Queen had an early engagement on Tuesday and those who would be attending her needed to be up early. Lady Anne, instead of spending the Monday night in Tite Street, was spending the night in the palace. She was across the corridor from a bedroom occupied by Shirley, who was up from Windsor to dress The Queen and do her hair before the day’s activities began. William had knocked on Shirley’s door and they’d had a quick but voluble conversation in the hall about what had happened. He reported that the equerry had discovered, and confirmed, that The Queen had left the palace sometime after luncheon and was now officially missing. He also told her about the Scottish railway timetable they’d found on The Queen’s computer, which made them guess that was where she was headed. William had asked whether Shirley knew anything about this. He’d received a blustery negative. She verbally boxed his ears for frightening her, and threatened him with physical punishment if this were a joke. “Dead serious, Shirley,” said William with all the light and play gone out of his eyes. In the midst of this, Lady Anne, hearing the commotion, had come out into the corridor and heard the story of The Queen’s disappearance repeated. As she knew nothing either, William told them that he and the equerry were trying to find out if anything could be learned from the Mews, but that they thought of going to Scotland themselves, maybe together, as soon as they were able. He’d then disappeared down the corridor, leaving the two women looking at one another in confusion.
Shirley and Anne had both served The Queen for a very long time, though in different capacities. Shirley stood behind her in the morning and brushed out her hair. Anne stood behind her in the afternoon and made small talk with the wives of factory owners during official visits. Shirley’s mother and grandmother had both been pensioned off by the Royal Household and retired to cottages near the Dee in Scotland. Anne’s brother had nearly married The Queen but had died young, and the present Marquess, Anne’s nephew, was unknown at the palace. He was never invited to anything. Shirley and Anne were accustomed to seeing one another in the corridors and on the backstairs, and though they were as polite and distantly friendly as palace manners required, they were frankly suspicious of one another. Shirley regarded Anne as just another version of Letitia d’Arlancourt, and as such, her bitter enemy. She thought there was little enough difference between the ladies-in-waiting.
For her part, Anne was rather jealous of The Queen’s evident affection for Shirley and the way she relied upon her for everything. The two of them would be in the backseat of the big palace Bentley, known as “the Beast,” going off to an afternoon event. The Queen would introduce many of her opinions with Shirley’s point of view. “Shirley says, and I agree, it will be hot when we go to Kentucky.” What does Shirley know about the weather in Kentucky, thought Anne. Or, “Shirley has found the most marvelous things for your lips. Peppermint with a tingle.” “Has she, Ma’am?” replied Anne flatly. Even, “Shirley thinks Labour will be out before long.” Anne thought she might just mention this to the Prime Minister the next time she was entertaining him with a drink, softening him up, as it were, in the ten minutes before The Queen was ready to give him his audience on a weekday evening. She imagined with satisfaction the surprise on his face. The Queen’s most trusted source of political information her Scottish dresser. How that would make him pale.
The two women were unprepared for much intimacy when they stood facing one another in the blue-carpeted hallway lined with white wainscoting. Both of them had planned on early nights, tea on a tray, some television, and lights out well before nine in the evening. They’d both got out of their street clothes and into their dressing gowns, though for different reasons. Anne had been having arthritic pains in her lower back and shoulders. She hadn’t the money to pay for a private nurse, and she couldn’t face leaving her flat to go live in sheltered housing paid for by the National Health Service. She wasn’t sure but she thought her condition might be degenerative and she would have to face something like that before too long. To bed early with a couple of pain pills and a hot water bottle was her remedy. Shirley, for her part, missed the all-female bedtime chitchats she’d had in her girlhood with her mother and grandmother. With no men about, and one or two women friends who were staying, everyone in flannel nightdresses or cotton pajamas, it was her fondest memory of belonging and being looked after. Getting early into her nightclothes was Shirley’s way of remembering those far-off days of sisterhood. Nevertheless, both Shirley and Anne were embarrassed to be seen in déshabille, especially by one another, when it was still early.
“This is very unlike Her Majesty, Mrs MacDonald,” said Anne, raising her chin and pretending as if she always met Shirley MacDonald while only dressed in bathrobe and slippers.
“It is, Lady Anne,” said Shirley, more abruptly, rather short-tempered with herself for not knowing more about what her mistress could be doing outside the palace walls.
“I hate to think what might happen to he
r, um, outside,” said Anne.
Both women knew that she was not talking about the weather. They both paused a moment to let the more horrible possibilities pass through their minds. An elderly woman falling off a curb she didn’t notice into the path of an oncoming taxi was the least of the horrible things they imagined.
Recovering herself, and shuddering slightly, Shirley offered, in a feeling of desperation, “She mentioned something about Leith.”
“Leith! What would she want in Leith?”
“Britannia, Lady Anne.”
“Britannia, Mrs MacDonald? Surely not. On her own? At this time of day? They all said goodbye to her years ago.” Anne was thinking as she said this of how they’d all blubbed in the most undignified way. Blubbing about a boat, indeed. Sometimes she wondered why she worked for this family. But then she recalled there had been some merry times, especially when they were in turquoise seas, away from the cold waters of this miserable little island. She knew too how The Queen was usually at her best on board ship, most natural, least shy, unbuttoned. Why shouldn’t she want a visit to her happy place, as she believed it was called now? Ministers had been unwilling to pay for a new vessel when Britannia was decommissioned. It was a slap in the face. There had been a royal yacht ever since Queen Victoria’s day, and The Queen set store by doing everything as Queen Victoria had once done it. Anne decided it wasn’t impossible that The Queen should want to revisit the old yacht. “What did she say about Leith, exactly?” She used a tone to convey that they were in this together, the two of them, almost as if to apologize, without actually saying so, for the tone of voice she’d used a moment earlier when she’d poured scorn on the idea of The Queen going by herself to Leith.
“I mean only that now that you mention it, Mrs MacDonald, it doesn’t seem all that preposterous. She mentioned Leith, did she?”
“Yes, Lady Anne.” Shirley was not about to allow herself to be cross-examined by a bad-tempered lady-in-waiting at this sort of crisis. She’d noticed The Queen not entirely herself in the last several weeks, more absentminded, abstracted. She was afraid it might be that thing President Reagan had had. The prospect of it was too unappealing to consider at length, but it wasn’t something Shirley wanted people finding out about. She had an intense protective instinct and she was willing to put herself forward as the human barrier against an outside world that would regard The Queen’s slight absence of mind as an illness. She knew that Lady Anne was an old palace fixture, but she didn’t intend to confide in her either. She was silently determining how she might get up to Leith at this hour to look for The Queen, and where she would stay, and how she might pay for this if she were travelling on her own limited pocketbook.
“Now, look here,” said Anne in her bossiest regimental tone. “I have the use of a flat in Edinburgh. Charlotte Square. My nephew’s. Used to belong to me, but it doesn’t anymore. Still, he’ll let me use it. What if the two of us were to go up and look for her? We could stay in Charlotte Square. My nephew has a small plane. He’ll pay to fly us up there. It’s the least that young man can do for us.”
“No, thank you, Lady Anne,” said Shirley stiffly. She operated on the principle of no excess information to the upper servants that they didn’t need to know, and she wouldn’t rely on Lady Anne any more than she would on the private secretaries or the Mistress of the Robes, or even the Prime Minister, as of course he was, technically speaking, an upper servant too.
Anne detected her error in addressing Shirley MacDonald as if she were a private soldier. “What I meant, Mrs MacDonald,” she said changing to a friendlier tone of voice, “is that we won’t serve her well if we’re at cross-purposes. You have a sense of where she might have gone. Leith. I can get us there with the minimum of fuss. Shan’t we join forces?”
“Shan’t,” said Shirley to herself, inwardly harrumphing at the words. Shall not. Sounded biblical. Still, what Lady Anne had said was sensible. She had no idea how to get to Leith at this hour, and a place to stay in Edinburgh would be useful. The Queen might not be at Leith, after all. There might have to be some hunting and searching.
“Very well, let’s go together.” There was then an awkward pause. She drew herself up to her greatest height and tightened the belt on her housecoat. “On one condition. I’m Shirley.”
“Very pleased to meet you, Shirley,” said Anne, her eye twinkling. She didn’t put out her hand. “I’m Anne, as you know.” A pause while the two women sized one another up for the first time as women rather than as coworkers in an unusual and antique hierarchical order. “Shall we meet out here in fifteen minutes? Pair of jeans and a headscarf?”
Shirley rolled her eyes. “No headscarf. You might as well wear a name badge saying, ‘I’m Her Majesty’s Lady-in-Waiting.’ We don’t want people to know she’s gone. We’re winging up there on the q.t. Got it?”
“Got it,” said Anne meekly, newly aware of a gruff habit of command that she’d never noticed in Shirley MacDonald before. “But it is raining. What are we to wear?”
“I’ve a baseball cap. Pulls down right over the eyes. Have one for you too.”
“A baseball cap? Really.”
“Do you want your picture on the front page of The Scotsman? ‘Her Majesty’s Lady-in-Waiting Found Trawling Around Leith After Midnight’ ”?
“No, of course not. You’re right. We must keep this hush-hush.”
Shirley sighed with exasperation. “Now, go and dress yourself. Meet me back here in a quarter of an hour.”
Rajiv had returned to the cheese shop feeling a little disconsolate after his coffee with Rebecca. He found that his colleagues now wanted their breaks. So he was left alone on the darkened afternoon with no customers and no one beside him behind the counter. When the tiny woman with a blue hoodie and a headscarf came through the door, he could see immediately who she was. He’d photographed her before. Her coming through the doorway now, alone, told him that something unusual was up, so grabbing his phone to take her picture didn’t occur to him. There was something that touched him about her vulnerability, an old woman out by herself on a wet afternoon three weeks before Christmas.
He also saw instinctively that, if she weren’t exactly wishing to appear incognita, that she wasn’t at Paxton & Whitfield on an official visit either. He was a polite young man and he thought at the very least a bow was probably necessary, but he wasn’t sure how, or whether it came before speaking to her or afterwards. What was he meant to call her? Instead, he just addressed her as he would any other customer. “A very wet afternoon, Ma’am.”
The Queen had forgotten the weather as she’d tried to remember how to find Jermyn Street. She didn’t mind actually. It was quite fun looking for places on your own rather than being driven straight to the door by someone who knew precisely where he was going. “Yes,” she said, turning around to look back out at the street. “I suppose it is.”
Rajiv could see that she was distracted. He thought keeping her in conversation until someone came inside to attend her might be best. “Sleet too.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Looking at the shop windows? Fortnum’s has wonderful windows this time of year.”
“No, you see, I couldn’t remember quite where you were. So I came along here, not sure if the shop were still here. Jermyn Street in my grandmother’s day, now, was quite disreputable.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I believe there was a famous madam at the Cavendish Hotel.”
“I didn’t know, Ma’am. It’s all men’s shirts along here now.”
“Yes, I see that. But whenever anyone calls me ‘Madam’ now, you know, instead of ‘Ma’am-rhymes-with-ham,’ I always laugh to myself and think of that madam of the Cavendish Hotel.” Rajiv’s politeness and his being smoothly unsurprised by her visit to the shop made The Queen forget for the moment that she was absent without leave from the palace.
Sh
e might be distracted, thought Rajiv, but she still had a sense of humor. She was good even at telling a little harmlessly wicked story. “I don’t think the Cavendish is quite so louche now.”
“No, I expect it isn’t.”
“Saudi princes, I imagine.”
The Queen heard the slight dismissiveness in Rajiv’s voice and thought she’d better stick up for the Saudis and multicultural Britain, of which she was rather proud. “Well, they’re wonderful breeders.”
“Breeders?”
“Horseflesh, I mean,” said The Queen.
“Of course.”
“Which brings me to my errand.”
“Can I help, Ma’am?”
“Yes. I’m sure you can. Now, there’s a very peculiar horse. Born on the same day as me, it turns out. Not the same year, of course. But we share a birthday.” The Queen said this as if she expected him to congratulate her.
“What fun.”
“Yes, I think so.” The Queen looked with a momentary brightening off over Rajiv’s shoulder.
“And this particular horse likes cheese?” offered Rajiv.
“Yes. How did you know?” The Queen was surprised that this young man should have so quickly divined the purpose of her excursion.
“Well, I have a friend . . . well, not a friend, more of an acquaintance really. She’s, well, we’ve only just had coffee once. This afternoon, but . . .”
The Queen could see the change that had taken place in Rajiv’s face. He was speaking of something that caused him both pleasure and embarrassment. Made him hopeful and disappointed at the same time. “I see,” she said, raising her eyebrows to him in an encouraging way. “Do go on.”
Rajiv thought she was the one who needed help, but now she was helping him, and he was grateful. “Well, she has flame-colored hair. Looks after horses somewhere. She first came in a little while ago, a month or so back, about a horse of hers that liked cheddar, a particular cheddar I think we have here, and maybe, well, I doubt it can be found anywhere else.”