by William Kuhn
The young woman watched the older woman walk deliberately over to the group of homeless. For the first time she noticed the skull and crossbones on the back of her hoodie, the well-cut skirt, and the muddy pumps. “What a voice,” the young woman said to herself. And putting the car into gear as she prepared to drive away, she took her left hand and put it up to her nose. Homeless elderly women often smelled as if they hadn’t washed as much as they should, but this was entirely different. It was the old woman’s perfume, the scent of orange blossom.
The taxi driver drew up next to the Britannia at Leith, wondering what two old women could want with a tourist attraction at this time of night. “It’s shut,” he couldn’t help saying when he stopped at the security kiosk, even though Anne’s earlier commands had intimidated him.
“Of course it’s shut, young man,” said Anne impatiently. “It’s on the way to midnight. Who do you think we are?”
He didn’t like her bullying tone of voice and began to answer her.
“She doesn’t mean for you to answer,” said Shirley, seeing the idea for a rejoinder cross his brow. “Will you wait for us, please?”
Both women got out of the taxi and walked to where they could see a security guard sitting inside at a desk.
“It’s shut,” began the guard, as if he’d prearranged his answer with the taxi driver.
“We can see that,” said Anne with annoyance in her voice. “We’re looking for someone.”
“No one here but me.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary tonight, then?”
“And why would I tell you if there had been?” In his experience, old women sometimes rose to a bit of impertinence.
She knew they were out of place next to a darkened ship in the middle of the night on an Edinburgh quay, but it still surprised Shirley that a young man could address two women who were both old enough to be his grandmother in this familiar way. She threw him an angry glance in order to give him a visual rap over his knuckles. “Not the way you speak to a lady, young fellow.”
“A lady, now. Is that what she is? Is that what you are? I thought you were all just women these days.”
Anne interrupted. “This is your demesne. We can see that. But we need your help and we would like to know if you’ve seen anyone odd here tonight.”
Demesne was an unusual word. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant. It was the first time he thought these might actually be ladies in front of him. “Odd, like you, you mean?”
Anne had to admit he had a point. “Yes,” she conceded reluctantly, “odd, like us.”
“No, no one like you. No one at all. Quiet as quiet can be.”
“No one’s been here the whole evening, then?”
“No one, I’ve told you that.”
Anne sighed. They’d come a very long way to be met with this blunt negative from a night watchman. She had no idea where they’d go next. And she was aware they might have made fools of themselves to have come as far as they had on the basis of one slim recollection of Shirley’s.
“Hang on a minute,” said Shirley abruptly. She’d been prowling around the guard’s room while Anne questioned him, and on a shelf behind his desk she found a scarf. Holding it up bunched in one hand, the heavy silk poured into her other hand as if it were water out of a jug. “What’s this, then?”
“It’s the cleaner’s scarf,” said the young man casually. “She dropped it on her way out. I only found it after she left. I’ll give it her tomorrow when she comes back on her shift.”
“You said no one had been here,” said Anne indignantly.
“What would you lot be wanting with the cleaner?”
Shirley held up the scarf with both hands now. It had reins and horses wearing medieval armor on a red background. It was almost a square yard in size. “Does the cleaner always wear Hermès to work, then?”
“Don’t know anything about our May’s. Don’t know if May’s even her name. The cleaners come and go. I’ll give it back to her tomorrow night.”
“Thank you, young man,” said Anne. “We’ll give it back to her.” Shirley had handed the scarf to her and she examined it, recognizing instantly that it was the same scarf The Queen had sent her back to the Castle for the afternoon she met Luke.
“What if I see her first?” said the guard, feeling as if he had been caught out in a lie, when all he had done was to collect a scarf from the pavement when he was having a smoke, which he honestly intended to return to its owner on the following evening.
The two women looked at one another. What if he did see her first? What if The Queen returned here before they could catch up with her? Anne wrote down her mobile telephone number on a scrap of paper sitting on the young man’s desk. “Call me if she turns up again, please.”
“Who is she, then? If it’s not May, the cleaner, what’s her name, then?”
Anne did not mean to answer this and was hustling Shirley out the door when he threatened to report them to his superiors. This, Shirley realized, might give up the game before they’d found The Queen, and she wanted to make sure he did no such thing. With Anne outside, striding toward the waiting taxi, Shirley stopped back in and said to the young man a little more kindly than either of them had spoken to him before, “Look, it belongs to Mrs Le Roy, a woman we both work for, um, a woman who works with us. We need to find her before she gets into any trouble. Okay? So do please call us if she turns up again.” She took a mini whiskey bottle the stewardess had given her and placed it on his desk while looking at him gravely. Then she was out the door.
The Queen got out of the social worker’s car. The station was darker than she’d expected. The social worker was right. She went up to check the departures board and found that the first train to London King’s Cross was not until after five in the morning. She sighed. A long wait. “Well, no more royal train. That’s how it will have to be, Little Bit. Find something to do. Don’t just stand there,” her internal nanny said to her. She wandered away from the departures board and toward the van the social worker said would have a cup of tea. She was surprised that they were doing such a brisk business in the middle of the night. There was a crowd of perhaps twenty or thirty, both men and women, all ages, dressed in many different layers, some talking to themselves, some talking to each other. Many had weather-roughened voices. Some had more animation than was necessary. Others looked stonily vague. These were the dossers down, the homeless. She knew that. She hadn’t had much to do with them. The Prince of Wales, she seemed to recall, had spent several nights with them under Waterloo Bridge. She believed Diana too had been interested and hoped to help. They had never been one of The Queen’s specialties, but she looked at them now carefully. Was she so different from them? She had no particular place to go, at least not for a little while. She liked the idea of a cup of tea. So she stood in the queue, waiting for the woman at the fold-down counter to pour her a cup of tea out of an industrial-sized kettle. The Queen was the last to be served. She rather liked that, waiting her turn, going last. It was a new experience. She supposed it was a little like Marie Antoinette pretending she was a shepherd, but she didn’t care. It took her out of herself, and that relieved the pain.
“Our last customer!” said the lady at the counter cheerfully when The Queen reached the front. “What’ll it be, my love?” She pretended as if she had a large selection of drinks and snacks.
“Well, I’d love a cup of tea, if you can manage,” said The Queen.
“You’re in luck, my darling. It’s all we have left.” The tea lady poured out dark tea. “And what about a bacon sarnie?”
“Well,” said The Queen doubtfully, “I dined quite well on the train earlier. I don’t think so. Thank you.”
The tea lady regarded this as an invention. Few of the homeless, in her experience, had actually arrived on trains, and none of them had eaten on board. She wrapped up a sandwich in a servie
tte and pushed it forward with The Queen’s tea. “You just put this in your pocket for later. You might be peckish in a few hours.”
The Queen put the sandwich into the pocket of Rebecca’s hoodie as she’d been instructed. She then took the cup of tea into both hands and held it, finding it warmed her chilly fingers nicely. “Have you done this long?” asked The Queen. Her instinct began to mingle with a genuine revival of curiosity.
The woman put down the kettle, and, as there was no one else to serve, folded her arms and leaned on the counter. “About fifteen years, I reckon.”
“Quite a long time to be staying up so late in the night. In a railway station too. In the cold. And damp.”
“Well, it’s not me. It’s the church, isn’t it? I’m retired now. Used to work in an office. And I get more thanks pouring out tea at midnight than I ever did turning up for the old nine-to-five, if you get my meaning.”
“Yes. I’m sure that’s so,” said The Queen. “And what hours do you do?”
“Well, we go to the church hall around nine of an evening to make the sandwiches and put tea things together for the van. Distribute some tea and sandwiches there first. Then come here. Afterwards we go to a few railway underpasses where they’re expecting us. Back to the church around two in the morning.”
“Quite a long night for you, then.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel long, because you’re helping out, you know? People are happy to see you. Grateful for a kind word along with the cuppa.”
The Queen felt it was time for her to be moving on. There must be someone else for her to acknowledge, if not in the van, then roundabout somewhere. So she put her tea down carefully on the counter and said to the woman, “May I just say ‘Thank you,’ on behalf of all of us, for what you’re doing?” She then reached up with her bare hand and took the surprised hand of the tea lady.
The woman was often thanked for the cups of tea she poured out, but seldom in such a formal way, and with such a distinctive, acknowledging handshake. “You’re very welcome, I’m sure,” she said, laughing. Something about the touch of the old woman’s wrinkled hand felt magical. She couldn’t say exactly why, but all of a sudden she felt quite giddy and as if she were glowing.
“No, I mean it,” said The Queen, who wasn’t used to laughter when she thanked someone. “I think you deserve an order.” The Queen noted the woman’s reaction to the touch of her hand and thought to herself, “The touch. May still be working after all.” She then added, because she was honest and needed to point out the difficulties, “Well, you need to be nominated first. It does take a while. I shall mention it in the right quarter.”
The tea lady was used to homeless people pretending that they had special access to the Prime Minister. “You do that, my love.” She meant to say it skeptically, but she couldn’t help smiling beatifically. The older woman nodded to her in a gesture that was in the middle distance between a farewell and a benediction.
Shirley and Anne, having failed to find The Queen at Leith, climbed back in their taxi. At least they knew by her headscarf that she had been there. But where to next? Then Shirley remembered mentioning Waverley railway station in the same conversation in which they’d discussed Britannia. They decided to ask the driver to go there. On arrival in the station, they got out of the taxi, wondering what to do, when they heard what sounded like a barroom laugh coming from a group of people gathered around a van. The Queen was on the edge of the group, unrecognizable except for her shoes, and the lined hem of her Hardy Amies skirt. Shirley remembered laying it out for her that morning. Unable to speak, as she felt a kind of wordless horror, Shirley grabbed Anne’s bony elbow and pointed.
Anne looked, and she saw the same vision. The two women advanced on tiptoe across the station concourse and stopped short of where The Queen was standing. When The Queen turned away from the van, Shirley and Anne both hurried up to her.
“Ma’am, where on earth did you find that terrible jacket?” said Shirley in a voice that was frightened and angry and relieved all at once.
“But Shirley, what are you doing in Edinburgh in the middle of the night?” said The Queen, with some confusion in the pale pockets around her eyes. She looked at Anne. “And Lady Anne too? Not good for your rheumatism, surely?”
Anne saw The Queen’s confusion and said, “We’ve found a bed for you, Ma’am,” as if she’d been a part of The Queen’s Scottish planning all along. Shirley immediately understood Anne’s plan of not requiring any explanations of The Queen right away. So she went to The Queen’s elbow and began making small encouraging noises in her ear. “Now, Ma’am, we’re just taking you to a warm bed. Won’t that be nice? A soft pillow. What a long day you’ve had. Where on earth did this awful hood come from?” It was the first time Shirley showed real irritation, as she saw the skull and crossbones on the back of The Queen’s hoodie. She felt a proprietary air about The Queen’s clothing and was shocked to find her mistress clad in something so unsuitable.
“Rebecca from the Mews lent it me. It’s all right, Shirley,” said The Queen gently. She didn’t like to see Shirley upset.
“Now what, you oaf?” said Rebecca miserably, having surveyed Waverley station and found no one remotely resembling The Queen or her former companions.
“I was an ogre earlier. You seem to specialize in these medieval insults,” said Rajiv.
“Look, there’s no time for fooling around. We have to find her.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s much point in racing off somewhere unless we know where she went. Doesn’t she have a palace here, then? Or maybe she’s up there,” he said, nodding toward Edinburgh Castle, which was above them, alit in the night, outside the station entrance.
“She has a place to stay in London. I don’t think she would have come all the way up here just to spend the night at Holyrood. Edinburgh Castle’s not hers.”
“Well, if you want to go into it, Holyrood isn’t hers either. Belongs to us. The people.”
“When this is over I’m going to make sure she steers well clear of you. The republicans do well enough on their own. She doesn’t have to buy her cheese off one.”
“Hang on! I’m pro-Queen, but this is constitutional, not absolute, monarchy. She takes her orders from us.”
“Yes, and you’re William Shakespeare.”
This cut him to the quick. She didn’t know how much that hurt. His silence would have given her a small indication if she had been paying attention. What’s more, he was afraid she was right. He’d begun calling himself “a poet” too soon, before he was actually sure he could do it. Maybe he was just good at appreciating poetry, rather than writing it.
Rajiv began more formally, addressing her from an injured distance, which he hoped she noticed, “Well, perhaps you’d better telephone Equus and tell him where we are. Where we last saw her.”
She took out her phone and stepped away from him into a corner of the station’s entrance so he couldn’t hear her conversation. She telephoned Major Thomason. No answer. She left a message to say that she was at Edinburgh Waverley, that The Queen had arrived on the same train, but disappeared. She didn’t know where. She thought it best to say she would stay in the station until she had some further contact or instructions from him. She then turned and went back to rejoin Rajiv.
“Well?” said Rajiv.
“We stay here.”
“Is that what he wants us to do?”
“You can do whatever you like. I must stay here until I hear from him again.”
It was a rather cold way for a railway journey to end, especially one that had begun with such unexpected promise.
They both slid down onto some plastic seats in the waiting area. Two unhappy young people. Feeling tired, not a little disillusioned, and hopeless. Soon, in spite of their mutual determination to stay alert, they were both asleep.
Rajiv awoke with a start more tha
n an hour later. On the other side of the station, on the edge of a group with white cups, was a small figure with silvery hair under her blue hood. She’d evidently lost her headscarf.
“Wake up. She’s back. Wake up.”
“Leave me alone.”
“No, darling, not about you, not this time. The Queen. She’s here.”
“Where?” said Rebecca, straightening up right away.
“Là-bas. Avec les homeless.”
“God!”
“She’s all right. No one’s bothering her. Must be some charity. Wonder what they’d think if they knew they’d just poured out tea for Mrs Sheba?”
Rebecca took out her telephone. Still no calls from the equerry. Very odd. She tried his number. No answer. Just the voice mail. She rang off without leaving a message. “Damn it.”
“Not there? What’s the palace good for? They’re not even taking your calls, are they, sweetheart?”
“Quit. Fooling. Around. We can’t lose her this time. We’ve got to go after her.”
“You said we couldn’t go up to her unless we’d been invited.”
“Well, it’s different if she’s surrounded by thugs and bums.”
“They’re just on the street. They’re not thugs or bums. They choose to be that way, most of them. Nothing to fear from them. It doesn’t look like she’s in trouble.”
Rebecca didn’t have a better idea. So she sat where she was on the edge of her plastic seat, next to Rajiv, and watched until two strange women approached The Queen directly. One was shorter and a little frail, the other was taller and sturdier. They appeared to have recognized her.
This was enough for Rebecca. She said fiercely to Rajiv, who was also watching the two women, “Okay. Now we move.”
“Hang on a sec. Look, they seem to know her.”
The Queen talked with them briefly and then the three started off, arm in arm, toward a waiting taxi.