by Ashly Graham
‘Do you think that wise, sir?’ The Lord Chamberlain heard himself sounding like Sergeant Wilson responding to an order of Captain Mainwaring’s in an episode of Dad’s Army.
‘We do, LC. We think it wise because it is we who are the King, and you who are the Lord Chamberlain. And let us be clear what we mean here, LC. Write this down: There is to be no more of anything that requires an internal combustion engine or solid or liquid fossil or other fuel and a battery to power it, hybrids not excepted, whether the propulsion be afforded by petrol or diesel or kerosene or biodiesel or ethanol or propane or hydrogen gases, and whatever else there may be...chip fat, for example...that is capable of effecting translocation of a party or parties from A to B or anywhere else within the alphabet. I will allow migratory fish-friendly hydroelectric and wind turbine-generated rechargeable and solar-powered vehicles on a case-by-case basis, subject to monthly inspection to catch any scoff-laws.’
‘…“hybrids not…”’
‘So in addition to forbidding motor cars, LC, we are talking no aeroplanes, rockets, ships, boats, or ferries.’
‘… “biodiesel or eth…” We are? Bloody hell.’
‘They poison the air with noxious fumes, exhaust, that block the light needed for the photosynthesis of plants and the growing of crops. They steal their oxygen and ours too.’
‘I get your drift, sir.’
‘It’s not a drift, LC, it’s a tide, a carefully plotted course. Put pencil to paper again, if you please.’
The Lord Chamberlain wrote in a shaky left hand: ‘NO MORE CARS, ETC.’ He underlined the ETC twice, and tucked the pencil behind his ear under his peruke, so that the wig was askew. ‘With respect, Your Majesty, how will your people get around?’
‘On foot, of course. They may use pushbikes. Or by swimming, now that we have cleaned up the rivers and dredged the canals. By using their imagination.’
The Lord Chamberlain imagined his new Royal Household pushbike. ‘But sire, in addition to the aforementioned motor cars, we would also be nixing lorries, trucks, buses, coaches, vans, taxis, motor bicycles, motor scooters, and mopeds.’
‘LC, you are most worthily entering into the spirit and we commend you for it.’
‘Thank you, sire, for your condescension.’
‘Jot ’em down, LC.’
‘Ha! Tractors, my liege. I omitted tractors. And steam trains, and trams and street cars, and…and hot air balloons. And may I venture to add sit-upon sod-busting lawnmowers to the list?’
‘Certainly you may, LC. Keep scribbling.’
‘That won’t be necessary, sire, I am cognizant with all the transports in question. Now with your permission I will proceed immediately to...’
‘Not so fast, LC. Primarily the people will employ workhorses of all denominations. Horses, ponies, palfreys, mules, donkeys, and asses—our lesser cousins once, twice, thrice and more removed. And behind the horses, the usual equipage of carriages, coaches and other turn-out will be employed. You know what I mean, LC. It almost goes without saying.’
‘Of course it does, sire. I will see to it without delay. Shall that be all, Your Highness?’
‘You may use cursive script, LC.’
The Lord Chamberlain dashed his peruke on the floor, held his pencil at the ready in his left hand, and gritted his teeth. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Coaches, yes: coach and four, or four-in-hands, and coach and six. Hackneys or jarveys. Chariots, even, but omitting the blades that Boudica, or Boadicea, depending on one’s nomenclatorial preference, the warrior queen of the Iceni tribe, caused to be affixed in the wheel-hubs to go into battle against the Romans. This is a peaceful nation, LC, and by Jove we do not want anyone getting their legs cut off like a frog by a string trimmer.’
‘By Jove I should bloody well say not.’
‘LC?’
‘It would be a shame, sir.’
‘Then there are the other permissible sorts of rig.’
‘Damn straight.’
‘Eh?’
‘Naturally, sir. Now if you would permit me to...’
‘...write them down, of course: Landaus and landaulettes. Berlins, chaises or shays and post-chaises. Victorias, broughams, barouches, phaetons, clarences, sociables, coupés, surreys, buggies, wagons, and wagonettes. Calashes, droshkies, quadrigas, brakes, drags, char-à-bancs, cabriolets, tilburies, whiskeys, traps, gigs, jitneys, sulkies. Omnibuses we have covered…or is it omnibi? Check that, would you, LC? Dogcarts, hansoms, flies, fiacres, diligences, growlers, palanquins, rickshaws, sedan chairs, shandrydans, curricles, caroches, barèges.
‘H’m. Oh, and wheelchairs, litters, stretchers. If I think of more, LC, I will let you know.’
‘Let me hold my breath.’
‘What?’
‘Sire.’
‘Oh, and if you like you could add all the marine and freshwater aquatic sail- and oar- and pole- and rope- propelled and pulled and tugged stuff, like dinghies and row-boats and punts and skiffs and gondolas.’
‘I’d like that only too much, sir...were it not for the fact that, why, how could you know?, I happen to own a sodding great encyclopedia in ten herniating volumes of all sodden marine and watercraft in general specificity and specific generality through the ages, which was recently reissued with updates and revisions and appendices. Volume ten is as it happens at present by my bedside. I will bring all of them into work one at a time in the basket of my Aunty Flo’s Raleigh bicycle and, ignoring my blisters, and to the great relief of my underworked and overpaid secretaries, I will copy it out myself word for sodding word holding the sodding pencil between each of my toes; until the skin is rubbed raw, when I will put the pencil in my mouth; and when my lips are numb I will stick it between my buttocks.
‘And then I will have my beloved petrol-guzzling carbon-dioxide-belching offence to humanity and the ecosystem Rolls-Royce motor car towed by a couple of oxen to the scrap yard, and borrow my Spiderman-bodied son’s Lance Armstrong-designed Tour de France racing bicycle with the drop handle bars and hard seat designed for a squirrel’s arse in order to come to work wearing a yellow jersey made out of cobwebs dyed with cats’ piss and embroidered with the letters LC in spider thread dipped in my own blood.’
‘Splendid, LC! Well there it is. What a fine couple we do make, eh?’
‘Eh?’
‘We say, LC, can you really write holding the pencil between your toes? We have tried it and, like, no way! Perhaps you saw the film My Left Foot. You see, for tomorrow we have another idea....’
Chapter Sixteen
So shamefully did Arbella neglect her duties as Mistress of the Plants that, happening one day across an unwatered orchid in a conservatory, King James’s suspicions were raised and he ordered an immediate survey to conducted amongst his chlorophyllous collection, to establish how widespread the hydroponic deficiency might be.
To his horror it was discovered that, although at Buck House and Windsor Castle the staff was doing its best to operate without direction, at royal outposts around the country many exotic plants were dying of dehydration, and lack of nutrients and conversation. Some, crazed by the strains not of Bach and Mozart but Heavy Metal and Punk Rock music had committed suicide by tying knots in themselves.
So sleep-deprived and unnerved were the five-hundred-year-old trees at Hatfield House and Knole that they had to be injected with sedatives and undergo treatment by arboreal psychiatrists and neurologists.
When she received a summons from the Lord Chamberlain to present herself at Court and explain herself, Arbella was incensed by the imperious tone of the message, and called for her butler, Ignacio Pesci. Pesci was a sallow individual with long greasy hair who had been spawned in the Naples slums and now lived in London’s “Little Italy”, Clerkenwell.
Although Ignacio Pesci had no butlering experience, he had been Arbella’s choice to replace the man whom she had been assigned by the Palace until she arranged him to work for a Chinese industrialist in Hong Kong at quadruple the
salary. Pesci was violently anti-royalist, and an admirer of the methods of the Spanish Inquisition; he had commended himself to Arbella when she walked past Speakers’ Corner near Tyburn, as King James had ordered that Marble Arch was again to be called, and heard him inveighing against the monarchy, whereupon she had interrupted him and made him an offer that he could not refuse to act as her henchman in undermining royal authority.
Upon being asked for his advice as to what she should do, Pesci mooted to Arbella that he, having had experience of the Italian army from doing national service—until he was cashiered for knifing a corporal from Pesci’s neighbourhood in Naples who at ten years old had stolen a bag of sweets from Pesci’s sister—as Arbella’s generalissimo should mount a popular insurgency against the King. As soon as they were victorious and James was in custody, Pesci would use an embalming instrument that he had mail-ordered from Alexandria to remove the King’s brain through his nose.
Arbella, after pondering King Charles the First’s speedy quittance at the block and deciding that the son of James the First had deserved less than summary execution, endorsed the plan, and Pesci assembled a team of his own hand-picked servants (the palace employees assigned to Arbella had also been found more lucrative employment elsewhere) and charged them with taking stock of the Tower’s arsenal of ancient weaponry.
The task took three days, and Pesci supervised everything dressed in doublet and hose and shoes that curled up at the toes. He affected to have a hunchback, swaggered about dragging a rapier that was too long for him, and picked his teeth with a stiletto as he issued his peremptory orders.
Next, Pesci set to training the force of his relatives, whom he had secretly brought in from Naples and billeted in a Wapping warehouse, in the use of the mediaeval equipment that he had commandeered. The Mediterranean squad quickly became proficient in the use of battleaxe, broadsword, falchion, truncheon, lance, spear, longbow and cloth-yard shaft, and in using a windas, or windlass, to arm a crossbow or arbalest with quarrel or bolt. They practised with halberds, and the related weapons of pikes, partisans, langues de boeuf, or ox-tongues, and with glaives and poleaxes, and flails, the spiky iron balls on chains that looked like the drilled and strung horse chestnuts that schoolchildren compete at the game of conkers with. They were in Neapolitan gangster heaven.
Arbella lost no time in taking Pesci with her to the Waterloo Barracks, for the purpose of investigating what might be behind the door that the Palace had forbidden her to enter. As she distracted the pair of Beefeaters who were guarding the entrance, by batting her eyelashes at them, the Italian felled them with the mace that he carried slung on his back in a viola case that had belonged to one of his sisters until she decided she was not musical. The strings of the instrument Pesci had kept for use as garrottes.
Seizing the ring of keys from one of the sentinel’s belts, Arbella unlocked the door and they strode into the room.
There, immaculately displayed and backlit in their glass cases were the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. Without waiting to be told, Pesci again put the mace to work liberating the trove from its housing. The weapon proved equal to the task of demolishing the thick glass, and Arbella gasped as she picked up item after item of the precious hoard. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls...the size and quantity was breathtaking.
Beholding them, the eyes of the Emperor of Central Africa, Bokassa, whose own coronation crown contained two thousand diamonds, would have bulged larger than the Star of Africa.
Attracted by the sapphire glint of a tiara, Arbella put it on and admired her reflection in what was left of a glass cabinet. Spotting Pesci behind her about to slip the Koh-i-noor diamond, the gift of some eastern potentate, into his pocket, Arbella turned and from ten paces away pinned his shoulder against the wall with the symbolically broken Sword of Mercy, or Edward the Confessor’s Sword. Pesci could not help but be impressed with the strength and accuracy with which she had thrown it, as he waited for Arbella to walk over to remove the short blade from his scapula and relieve him of the famous gem. She had made her point, in the only language he understood, and that was enough for both of them.
Chapter Seventeen
Now there was, residing in the Jewel House in a majolica pot, a large and dusty rubber plant, Ficus elastica. It was well over two hundred years old and vehemently loyalist. It had been Jugs’ confidant since he was a boy, and enjoyed conversing with the monarch when he visited the Tower.
Alerted to danger, Ficus fidelis emitted a series of sonic shrieks, which, though inaudible to the human ear, were picked up and decoded by the Chief Raven, Oswald, outside. Sine mora Oswald cranked up his pinions—like those of his junior, Corvax, they were still more or less functional—heaved himself into the air and flapped laboriously in the direction of Buckingham Palace to report the treacherous deed.
The venerable but energetic—now that it was roused—plant then attacked Signor Pesci with its sinewy stems, causing him to draw his rapier in defence. The two, Arbella reckoned as she stood to the side and watched, despite the Italian’s expertness were evenly matched, and the plant got in some vicious blows with its glazed earthenware pot as it parried and dodged a sequence of thrusts.
The joints of the Chief Raven’s sparsely feathered wings, the pristine jet colour of which had turned snowy with age, were rusty with disuse and progress was slow. But eventually he arrived, King James was fetched from the lake in the gardens where he had been discussing the nutritional content of duckweed with a mallard drake, and the King was advised of the larcenous affront to the national heritage.
Grasping his sceptre of lignum vitae, Jugs swore a mighty oath that he would recover his heirlooms at any cost, yea, even if it entailed mortal peril to his royal person. He recalled that when the Crown Jewels were stolen in 1303 they were only recovered after being spotted on display in the window of a jewellery shop. Indoors, he paced up and down and issued orders, counter-orders, and proclamations so fast that people knocked each other over as they ran back and forth to comply with his wishes.
So much steam was coming from the tunnels of the King’s ears and pouring from the windows, that London SW1 from Victoria to Hyde Park Corner was fogged in. Traffic ground to a halt, pigeons collided in the air, and two sentries outside St James’s Palace, believing that a terrorist attack was under way, shot each other.
After he had confused everyone as much as he could regarding his intentions, James ran to the courtyard where his green flying phaeton, fully fuelled with liquid bat guano, was on stand-by to whisk him wherever it was the royal pleasure, or displeasure, to go. Impatiently the King swatted his driver out of the way, leaped into the front and assumed the controls himself. Switching the fuel selector to the highest octane tank for maximum thrust, he fastened his safety harness and pressed the self-starter.
The machine powered up with a roar, and the triple exhausts coughed into action and asphyxiated Jugs’ driver. As the carriage rose into the air the King deployed his ears to act as radar—there was a lot of bird traffic in the area, so one had to be careful—and receive radio messages and meteorological information relayed from the Operations Room at the Palace.
Wrinkling his nostrils against the stench of the volatile rocket mixture, he slid his oxygen mask over his head to cover his nose and mouth.
In a twinkling they were over the area previously occupied by the odious South Bank complex comprising the Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery and—to the lasting shame of James’s line—the Royal National Theatre. The King jettisoned a quantity of depleted bat shit as he shuddered at the sight of the other architectural excrescences and nicknamed eyesores: the “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” of the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, the Eye, the Wobbly Bridge, Ken’s Testicle, the Razor, the Gherkin, the Helter Skelter, the Blob, the Shard of Glass, the Walkie Talkie, the Doodle, the Pinnacle, the Dome/O2 Arena, and the future apparition of a new Lloyd’s of London that would be known as the Inside-Out Buildin
g.
These prospects nearly caused Jugs to lose his breakfast of muesli and warm goat cheese, and he vowed to caused them all to be demolished and shipped as hard core in barges to Calais, during a cessation in hostilities to allow the French, as was traditional for them to do for the months of July and August, to go on holiday.
The architects would have their necks stretched on The New King’s Gallows at Tyburn, as Marble Arch had formerly been and now was again called.
Descending over London Bridge to the Tower, Jugs’ conveyance made a perfect landing in the dry moat surrounding the Tower of London. The piebald Chief Raven, Oswald, who had hitched a ride in the phaeton’s luggage compartment, holding his breath as much as he could on the way, staggered onto terra firma and threw up.
Hearing a commotion outside and the strangulated voice of the King talking to himself, Pesci, who had discarded his rapier and was now hacking at the rubber plant’s aerial and buttress roots, and branches alternately with the Jewelled Sword of Offering and the Great Sword of State, looked away; upon which Ficus elastica wrapped a stem round his neck and tightened until he passed out. Then the plant stuck its upper portion out of a window and fluttered its fronds like the arms of a damsel in distress.
Alerted to danger, Arbella scooped as much of the jewelled Coronation Regalia as she could into the folds of her skirt, and hurried back to her quarters in the White tower. From there she saw the thirty-five Yeomen Warders of His Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary milling around the Inner Ward. The Yeoman Warders were in disarray, pulling on their scarlet and gold dress uniforms as if they had been caught napping, which was indeed the case: they had been carousing until early that morning to celebrate the King’s Unofficial Birthday (James himself had forgotten about it, and no one had sent him a card) and were in no condition for action of any kind, least of all a fight.