After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘You don’t know?’

  His eyes bulged with incredulity. I shook my head.

  ‘How are the mighty fallen!’ he said, shaking his own.

  ‘That’s appropriate enough.’

  ‘No, no, you misunderstand. I was expressing my own sentiment. The motto is in Latin: Nil Quae Fed.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You never studied Latin?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘An approximate translation would be: What I did was nothing .’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too difficult to live up to.’

  ‘If you took it at face value I suppose it might describe someone who was merely untalented, inadequate and idle. Its real meaning is more subtle and contains the essence of the gentleman’s code. For someone who had truly done something - something as outstandingly courageous as Rudolf Rassendyll had - it would represent the very pitch of courtesy, altruism and sangfroid. It was nothing , when in reality he had given not less than everything for the sake of others. But for the same reason, by the same code, he could do nothing for his own sake. To make himself permanently King and live the rest of his life with the woman he loved but in another man’s shoes, that would be sheerly selfish and quite illegitimate.’

  ‘But if she loved him and wanted him to do it . . .’

  ‘It would be cheating. No good could come of it.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The book tells us that he was walking in the Palace garden, still wrestling with his conscience, when he was shot in the back by a hidden assassin, a servant of the villain Hentzau.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And soon afterwards, having taken leave of the Queen and his faithful courtiers, died, lay in state in the Cathedral and was buried with his supposed ancestors.’

  ‘A sad ending,’ I said, ‘but a smart solution.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  I thought about this for a while, staring at the ground and the Colonel’s nearest canvas-shod foot, which began to tap irregularly. I looked up to see that he was watching me closely.

  ‘One thing occurs to me . . .’I said and then stopped, not wanting to upset him again.

  ‘Speak your mind!’

  ‘Did he have children before he went to Ruritania and met Princess Flavia?’

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘Then if he was such a gentleman, how come he’s my great-grandfather? How come, I mean, he’s anyone’s great-grandfather?’

  ‘Your father said nothing about this?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He may not have known and probably did not care to inquire. But Lord Burlesdon certainly knows.’

  ‘I’ve never met him.’

  ‘I suppose your parents never told you that the Burlesdons paid for your education - and your brother’s.’

  ‘I did wonder how Mum and Dad could afford it, especially when he was totally against it. Haven’t the Burlesdons got any children?’

  This was beginning to sound interesting. An earldom, a country mansion and a fortune would suit me very nicely. There might even be a good car tucked away in one of the stables - a Bugatti or at least a Bentley.

  ‘Lord Burlesdon has five children, three of them sons.’

  I stared disconsolately at the fat plebs shuffling, wobbling and rolling past and thought how unfair life was, picking out the few for the real perks and leaving the rest of us with nothing much to look forward to beyond chips and chocolate bars.

  ‘Apart from Lord Burlesdon,’ said the Colonel, ‘I am probably the last person alive that knows this - my father told me before he died and he had it from the Queen herself when she was very old and knew her country was in deadly danger from Nazi Germany . . .’

  He went silent in mid-sentence. Even now his secret was too sacred or too scandalous to utter. Now that I’d lost my chance of an earldom, I couldn’t be bothered with all this fitting and starting.

  ‘What’s the problem, Colonel? It’s ancient history. Surely it doesn’t matter any more to anyone still alive?’

  ‘You think like your father, do you? The old days are wiped out? Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin have abolished the past? The truth is the very opposite: the past rises up to abolish Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin and all their lies, the dead rise from their dishonoured graves, nations revive and royalty will be restored.’

  2 The Waxwork in the Vault

  Karl had a mysterious assignation this morning,’ said my brother’s wife.

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Freddy, helping himself to new potatoes. ‘Did it lead to anything, Karl?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ I said, my mouth full of delicious braised liver.

  Jennifer was an excellent, straight-down-the-middle cook. I used to give my stomach appalling hangovers with the pretentious and expensive restaurant food I ate when I was flush and it was an extra incentive to stay unemployed that I felt so healthy on my hostess’s cooking. I’d refused to tell her anything about my meeting with Colonel Danzing, not even his name or where we’d met. This was partly on his instructions, partly because what he’d told me didn’t anyway bear discussing at a kitchen table in a terrace house in Hackney. It was OTT and OTR, over the top and open to ridicule, especially from Jennifer.

  ‘I presume it was some sort of job?’ said Freddy.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I decided it would be easier and more amusing to mislead him than stonewall.

  ‘In the City again?’

  ‘I don’t have much expertise at anything else, but it could mean going abroad.’

  ‘Well done!’

  ‘I haven’t got it yet. It’s only at the planning stage.’

  ‘You mean it’s a new appointment?’

  ‘More of a re-appointment. But there’s been a long gap.’

  ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘One of these retired military types.’

  ‘Personnel manager or higher up?’

  ‘Bit of both. It’s quite a small firm.’

  ‘But international?’

  ‘Mainly national, with international connections.’

  ‘He must think he is going to get it,’ said Jennifer. ‘He’s so extremely pleased with himself.’

  That wasn’t totally accurate. I was high, granted, but not on self-esteem. After all, if someone tells you, on a sunny day in Regent’s Park, that you’re the heir to a vacant throne, it’s more like winning the jackpot than a game of darts. Your own talents aren’t involved.

  Colonel Danzing insisted we start walking again before he’d reveal what he knew. I thought it unlikely there was anyone in the shrubbery behind us collecting state secrets, but the Colonel had spent most of his life defying the Soviet Empire from a two-room service flat in Marylebone and he was quite certain, even now, that the monster was only shamming dead. We went all the way down the broad walk, past the sexy sculpture of a naked boy with a shark -through the rose garden - where the Colonel showed me a red rose which he said was exactly the colour of the royal rose of Ruritania -and he still hadn’t come to the point, though he’d filled me in on a lot of history.

  Rudolf Rassendyll, my great-grandfather, walking in the garden of the Royal Palace in Strelsau, capital of Ruritania, while he tried to make up his mind between being a bogus king and a genuine English gentleman, was shot by an assassin. The wound was nasty, but not fatal, and while he was recovering he decided there was no way he could go on playing King Rudolf V, even though everyone in the secret, including Queen Flavia, urged him to. So they gave out he was dead and buried a waxwork in the royal vault under the Cathedral, while Rassendyll himself left the country in a heavy disguise. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he was going to have to pretend to be somebody else for the rest of his life anyway. His brother, Lord Burlesdon, was in the secret, but everyone else in the civilised world thought that both King Rudolf V and Rudolf Rassendyll were dead. Perhaps he hoped that when people had more or less forgotten about the sensational death of the King of Ruritania, he, Rasse
ndyll, could reappear and say that reports of his death were much exaggerated and that actually he’d been up the Amazon or down the Zambesi at the time.

  But he overlooked two things. First, he and Queen Flavia couldn’t really bear being apart for ever. Secondly, the secret of the original impersonation wasn’t all that secure. In particular, there was a former friend of Rupert of Hentzau, a person with a name like a bottle of white plonk - the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim - who had changed sides and given his word as a gentleman not to reveal what he knew, which was virtually everything except the fact that Rudolf Rassendyll hadn’t actually died of the assassin’s bullet. But as time went on, Luzau-Rischenheim got restive and couldn’t see the same reason as Rudolf Rassendyll for going on being a gentleman at the cost of not being King of Ruritania - or at least, in his case, Prince Consort. In other words, he fancied Queen Flavia and started suggesting -at first, no doubt, quite whimsically, but later very seriously and meaningfully - that she would surely prefer to marry him than . . . hum, ha ... keep brooding over a dead man whose name of course he would never dream of mentioning to anybody even when he was drunk with despair at her unfriendly attitude. He also played on the fact that her subjects were fed up with having no heir to the throne. Queen Flavia was the last of the Elphbergs and she showed every sign of remaining a widow for ever. Luzau-Rischenheim cultivated the editors of The Echo and The Gazette, the two main newspapers in Ruritania, and got a noisy lobby going for the Queen to remarry, preferably with some Ruritanian aristocrat of impeccable breeding, distant royal lineage and known admiration for her, such as the handsome and popular Count of Luzau-Rischenheim.

  Rudolf Rassendyll, meanwhile, had changed his name to Edwin Fenton, dyed his hair, grown a huge bushy beard and retired to a fisherman’s cottage in South Cornwall, where he took up photography. He couldn’t see any of his old friends any more, of course, but he made new acquaintances among the artists’ colony around Newlyn/Penzance and he lived quite comfortably on his own money, which had passed, at his supposed death, to his nearest relative, Lord Burlesdon. The Earl arranged with a discreet solicitor for the income to be forwarded monthly to ‘Mr Fenton’ in Penzance and my great-grandfather might have been reasonably content, apart from a lot of pain from the old wound in his back, but for the thought of Queen Flavia and for her thoughts of him.

  After a couple of years’ abstinence, she became really ill and her loyal courtiers decided there was nothing for it but a summer visit incognito to the Swiss mountains. ‘Mr Fenton’ also visited the Swiss mountains that summer with his camera and brought back a lot of pictures of a particular lady which he showed to nobody. Nor did he spread it about that he’d made a secret marriage, but he did return the following summer to the Swiss mountains, while Queen Flavia’s continuing ill-health meant she had to return there too.

  This became a habit with both of them, until one year Queen Flavia became so indisposed that she had to enter a clinic in Switzerland and stay there over Christmas and into the spring before returning to her anxious subjects in Ruritania and the increasingly pressing attentions of Count Luzau-Rischenheim. ‘Mr Fenton’ had also been absent for a longer period than usual and he returned to England in the company of a nurse and a baby, who took up residence at Burlesdon House in Hampshire, while Mr Fenton resumed his photography in Cornwall. That baby, christened Charles Gordon after the famous martyr of Khartoum, was my grandfather. He was never called Fenton but was adopted by Lord and Lady Burlesdon and known by their family name of Rassendyll and, since he had red hair and a longish nose, it was always assumed that he was actually the Earl’s son and that the Countess had behaved very maturely in letting him into the family and treating him just like her own older children, to the point of being genuinely fond of him and even in due course sending him to Eton. In fact the Burlesdons and their descendants continued to subsidise the education of Charles Gordon Rassendyll’s children (including my father) and grandchildren (me and my brother), though not at Eton, because death-duties and inflation had by then made a shocking hole in the family finances.

  But this is going too far ahead. Back in Ruritania in the 1890s, Queen Flavia received an ultimatum from the bottle of plonk. Luzau-Rischenheim’s tame newspapers were making out now that the Queen was spending so much time abroad because she no longer cared about her people and was even thinking of abdication. He told her that it was all very unfortunate, but the only alternatives he could come up with were for her to marry him or for the truth to come out about Rudolf Rassendyll posing as the King all those years ago. As a gentleman who had given his word to keep a secret he much preferred the first alternative, but even a gentleman must put the welfare of his country before his own scruples. Queen Flavia asked for time to think and there was a panic meeting in Zurich that year, attended by Fritz von Tarlenheim (the Queen’s most loyal courtier), ‘Mr Fenton’ and Lord Burlesdon. The plan they came up with was to take the sting out of Luzau-Rischenheim’s blackmail by publishing the story of the substitute King themselves. They reckoned that when the world read about Rudolf Rassendyll’s daring deeds and incredibly correct behaviour, everyone would feel sympathy for the Queen and understand why she couldn’t marry anyone else. They didn’t, of course, intend to give away the part Luzau-Rischenheim didn’t know about - the fact that Rassendyll had survived the assassin’s bullet or that he’d finally married the Queen or that they’d had a child. They felt that the Ruritanian public might possibly warm to the noble death, but no way to the waxwork in the royal vault.

  The story was ghosted by a London lawyer and published under the pseudonym Anthony Hope in two instalments - Rudolf Rassendyll’s own memoir of how he saved the King from Duke Michael’s machinations and Fritz von Tarlenheim’s account of the duel with Rupert of Hentzau, the death of King Rudolf V and the saintly renunciation of the throne by Rudolf Rassendyll with his subsequent assassination. It worked. Luzau-Rischenheim - who played a weasel role in the second instalment - was left with egg on his face and had to retire to his country estate, while Queen Flavia got so much sympathy that she must have wished she’d told the whole truth and brought her secret husband and child to Strelsau to live with her openly. There was one nasty moment when the question was raised by the editor of The Echo whether the charred remains of the real King Rudolf V lying in the graveyard in Zenda ought now to be exchanged with the body of Rudolf Rassendyll in the Cathedral vault. Luckily the editor of The Gazette - both newspapers had totally thrown over their allegiance to the luckless Luzau-Rischenheim - picked up an idea craftily floated by Tarlenheim at the end of his account. Such a gallant hero as Rassendyll, this editor argued, might not be strictly royal but surely did honour to the royal vault of the Elphbergs. He added that keeping the bodies in the wrong tombs with the wrong inscriptions would particularly appeal to tourists and that clinched his case.

  It was at about this point in his narrative that Colonel Danzing pointed out the red rose of Ruritania.

  ‘Like Mr Kinnock’s,’ I said.

  There had been an election recently in which Mr Kinnock and the Labour Party went about sporting red roses in their buttonholes and also featured them on posters. It didn’t do them any good. They went down to their usual decisive defeat.

  ‘Not in the least like,’ said the Colonel contemptuously. ‘The British Labour Party symbol is a tight, forced flower of the kind you buy in cellophane which dies before it opens. The royal rose of Ruritania is a crimson climber, full, round and virile. Mark it well and learn to distinguish it from inferior versions.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ I said, ‘that I have a claim to the throne of Ruritania?’ It sounded fantastic, even to me.

  The Colonel put the side of his shoe against a ball of horseshit which was lying on the stone path and propelled it with an elegant flick into the rose-bed. He glanced at me as if he wished he could do the same with me and then went on with his history.

  Queen Flavia had continued to reign with more or less popularity until 1914. She
ignored the question of a successor, which was occasionally aired in the Press, and most people assumed that, since she was now well past child-bearing age, it would have to be one of the Hapsburgs - the ruling dynasty of Austria-Hungary - who were distantly related to the Elphbergs. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and his family, the Hohenzollerns, also had a claim, but it was even more distant. Anyway, the heir to the Hapsburgs was shot dead and the First World War began - basically German-speakers against the rest. But although the majority of Ruritanians spoke German, Queen Flavia was such an Anglophile, for obvious reasons, that she tried to stay neutral. Kaiser Wilhelm couldn’t put up with a hole in his front line against Russia, so he occupied Ruritania and shunted the Queen off to an inaccessible castle in the Harz Mountains.

  When the war ended, the victorious anti-German powers were so pleased with Queen Flavia’s attitude that they restored her to her throne and treated Ruritania as if it had really been on their side - even though many Ruritanians had fought in the German armies. This made the country relatively prosperous and the Queen highly popular to begin with. The problem was that during the war she’d lost the great love of her life.

  As soon as Rudolf Rassendyll heard about her being imprisoned in the Harz Mountains, he set off to the rescue. He’d kept pretty fit in his Cornish retreat, but he was nearly seventy, so he obviously wasn’t up to the sort of exploits he’d written about in The Prisoner of Zenda. The Queen wasn’t particularly well guarded in her German castle and he could probably have walked through the main gate without much trouble, but he preferred to scale the walls by night. They found him in the dry moat in the morning, well dead, and since he wasn’t supposed to exist, the Queen had to pretend this white-haired, white-bearded corpse was a total stranger. The grief blew her mind, so that after the war when the Ruritanians had finished waving flags and throwing virile red roses to welcome her triumphant return to Strelsau, they soon realised they’d got an old, wild woman on their backs and began to wish they’d gone republican like the Germans and Austrians, or even communist like the Russians.