• • •
“But a horse-drawn carriage?” Daisy had asked, her eyes gone wide with disbelief, when Charles had come to collect her earlier. “Isn’t that maybe just a wee bit excessive?”
“But, my dear DeeDee,” Charles had said, tucking her hand inside the crook of his arm and giving it a reassuring pat, “I want to give you the royal treatment.”
Uh-oh.
• • •
Now Daisy watched the outer world pass by as though viewing it from the center of a dream. Admiralty Arch, St. James’s Palace, Clarence House (home to Daisy’s good buddy, the Q.M.): all seemed to whiz by her as she sat, bouncing along at Charles’s side, her hand clasped tightly in his. Something suspiciously furry had been thrown across her lap to prevent a chill, something fuzzy and soft and whose origins she had best not enquire about lest she be told that it had once been a living thing. As she looked out the window, she was finding that the phrase “going to the Mall” didn’t mean quite the same thing over here as it had back home. And, as the horses neared the end of the drive, she felt the knot in the pit of her stomach expanding as she recognized the full impact of the fact that, having approached by the eastern front, she would soon be at the portals of a one-of-a-kind kind of place; that rushing up to meet her was the supreme architectural expression of the British Monarchy; or, to put it more simply, in words of two, Buckingham Palace. And the royal standard flapping proudly overhead could mean only one thing: the Queen was in residence.
Halberd-bearers. The sounds of trumpets blaring.
The carriage rode through the forecourt now, seeming oddly to be going faster. Through the main gates of the Principal entrance, past the Superintendent’s Flat and the Housekeeper’s Flat—with their residences capitalized on the architect’s sheets, as though they really mattered; still, it was nice to have a title—and disappearing from public view into the quadrangle.
It was like being sucked into the air hose of a laundry dryer, like tripping and finding that one had fallen into a great big hole smack in the center of a rabbit warren, like waking up and finding that it wasn’t all a bad dream and your life really did exist now within the confines of Watership Down, like a frog on a lab slide. It was like…
Well, you do get the picture, don’t you?
Perhaps it was only a product of her imagination but, as the side of the carriage drew parallel with the Grand Entrance, Daisy could have sworn that she heard the unmistakable sound of a portcullis, the immense black metal spikes slamming shut behind her.
In a state of mild panic, she inhaled deeply, but she found that, now, her sense of smell had completely deserted her; the Nose was on the fritz.
But, then, did it really matter so much anymore?
Daisy was in the palace.
Part III
“Send Lawyers, Guns and Money…”
December
1
Daisy was running through the corridors of the palace.
And it wasn’t even a dream.
“No running in the hallways!” her second-grade teacher had shouted at her, predictably if unoriginally, during her formative years some thirty-one calendar selections previous.
“No running in the house!” Herbert Silverman had yelled, trying to make a threatening impression, as he waved his wife’s rubber spatula in the air, Rachel having quite often been just in the middle of the process of icing a chocolate cake. “You’ll give your poor mother a heart attack with all this noise, all this running here and this running there.”
“Nu, Daisy,” Rachel asked, not long before she’d died of a heart attack, “what’s the big rush? I don’t see anybody with guns chasing after you. Slow down; you’ll live longer,” she’d advised. “Besides, if the good Lord had meant for you to run around so much, he wouldn’t have given your father such a fancy-schmancy car.” Spatula in hand, she had wiped one flour-covered arm across her brow. “Now, come and help me lick this bowl,” she had finished up, the full weight of Eastern Europe behind her (and we do mean behind). “I made too much frosting again.”
But Daisy’s personality and behavior had proved to be entirely unbowed, her nature impervious to any and all attempts to form and impress. In fact, the phrase “child-resistant” had originally been coined to describe her, and it hadn’t been until a number of years later when an overworked pharmacist, on the brink of yet another malpractice suite, had overheard Herbert attempting to reprimand a chocolate-smeared Daisy and had appropriated the phrase for his own lawsuit-resistant invention.
And, as for advice, well… As far as our girl was concerned, heeding the conventional wisdoms spouted by others was for unimaginative weenies and following advice was strictly for idiots and anyone who had ever appeared on Oprah as part of a panel, which included a member of the psychiatric profession. This systematic weeding-out of those who believed that someone else had to know better than they did left the world with a short list, containing fewer names than last year’s Booker. And, surprisingly enough, Martin Amis did not appear on this one either. The List, then, in its entirety, included Daisy, the Queen Mother, and two clockmakers in Switzerland—whose timepieces didn’t say “cuckoo,” didn’t sell as well as the competition, did say the phonetically similar (but the semantically quite different) “caca,” and provided its inventors, through a goodly number of sales to the legally deaf tourists who came through town, with enough to cover the mortgage of their modest chalet plus a few good belly laughs to carry them through the slow season.
From a practical standpoint, then, what all of this meant was that it should hardly seem surprising that, when faced with the Principal Corridor, outside of the doors to her suite at Buckingham Palace, Daisy should feel inspired to go for her daily run. At 240 feet in length, divided in three by double glass doors—and with mirrors on either end, reflecting startling and seemingly incessant shrinking rectangular images—one could hardly have expected her to behave any differently. The red carpet, crimson specifically, appeared to roll out before her indefinitely.
Daisy had been placed in the Yellow Suite, next to the Balcony Room on one side, and with the aptly named Blue Suite on the other. And, while the titles of the rooms might have impressed Daisy as being a trifle banal—the unrelieved coloring of the décor just a tad too unicolor—she could at least discern the practicality behind such naming, from the maid’s view anyway. In fact, with over six hundred rooms in the palace, it probably would have made life a whole lot easier for all concerned, if the whole bloody thing had been color-coded. Instead, with just the possible dining rooms alone—the short list including the State Supper Room, the Household Dining Room, the Chinese Luncheon Room—Daisy was frequently finding herself confused, arriving to empty rooms; or arriving after everyone else had been seated and were impatiently awaiting her entrance so that they could commence with the watercress soup; or, oddly enough, entering a room only to learn that, for some strange reason, on that night she had been assigned to eat with the hired help.
Located diagonally across from the Throne Room, on the opposite side of the quadrangle on the Principal Floor, Daisy’s accommodations could have been a lot better but they could also have been a lot worse. She could, for just one example, have been placed in the Belgian Suite, the suite reserved for the grandest visitors to the palace. This was the place where world dignitaries like, say, the Clintons, would be put up were they to come to call. But then, Daisy admitted reasonably, were she to be in the more prestigious Belgian Suite, she would be situated on the Ground Floor. The Yellow Suite, on the other hand, meant that she was on the same floor as the Queen’s and the Duke’s apartments, making it easy to just pop in or out should her presence be required. And, if her rooms were not the best, at least they were not the worst. Why, she could have been wrongly—or, rightly, depending on your perspective—placed in the Housekeeper’s Flat. And then she would have had to figure out, all over again, how the heck a person was supposed to get by in life with just one toilet for just one person.
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br /> And when she thought about it, there were some things about the Yellow Suite that weren’t bad at all. Why, the amenities alone! What with the little soaps and the writing paper embossed with the Royal Crest, this was better than the Hotel Russell. The staff here was even instructed to lay out reading material, appropriate to each guest’s individual tastes. In Daisy’s case, the selection, fanned out on the canary night table, had included Chocolatier and—with a nod towards her progenitor’s reputed investing acumen—a copy of Morningstar 500 and the closing figures of the Dow Jones Index, updated on a daily basis. Clearly, they knew exactly whom they were dealing with. Then again, clearly they did not.
Unfortunately, however, in spite of the sunny hues and her given name, yellow was not Daisy’s primary color of choice. Thus, she found herself seeking out any excuse to escape the maddeningly cheerful confines of her Regency-style suite. What with bedrooms, bathrooms, a dressing room and a writing room, all designed in unmitigated shades of jasmine, she was beginning to feel as though an LSD flashback was imminent. It was only a matter of time before she began seeing those annoying seventies happy faces plastered all over the world. In order to obtain release from the odious color a run through the vivid, vibrantly carpeted halls had fast become a daily requirement. Besides, there was so much to see here!
The palace may have sat on over eight hundred acres of land, but it was the interior that could keep a person busy for an entire lifetime. It made Daisy feel as though she were in training for something. For starters, there were so many inanimate objects that one had to learn the names of. It may have been old hat for some, but who would have ever dreamed that she would be leading a life in which the distinction between ceramic and porcelain had become such a vital thing? Not to mention ormolu, gilt-edged, Regency style… Oh! And the architectural terms specific to castles alone! Postern; wall-walk; yelt. And just what the heck was bric-a-brac anyway? And was it something that the Royals would go in for heavily; or was it something better left behind on Coney Island, abandoned along with orange shag carpets and beanbag chairs?
There were also a seemingly endless number of seemingly uninhabited rooms to explore. There was the Chinese Dining-Room, which only seated a meager twenty, and where the R.F. (as she was coming to collectively think of the Family) liked to hold intimate dinners for themselves, with only occasional visitors. This room had enough of that porcelain and gilt stuff to choke a Shar Pei, along with blue walls and red carpets that she thought clashed terribly, but that no one else seemed to mind. Then there was the blue-columned Music Room, which overlooked the gardens and in which Charley had been baptized once upon a time. But, most of all, she liked to explore the Belgian Suite, which, at present, showed no signs of residents, with neither a Clinton stirring nor a Republican mouse. She couldn’t say what it was that drew her there so strongly, really, whether it was the Orleans bedroom, the Spanish dressing room, or the Caernarvon Room, the Suite’s own private Dining Room. Maybe it was simply the sense that Heads of State, or other individuals, who had actually done something for their countries had slept there; maybe it was the fact that the Queen had given birth to Prince Edward there, the bathroom done up as a sort of make-do delivery room, that drew her more morbid curiosity.
Best to just shake that vivid image off.
Finally, there were all the people to learn about, the so-called little people who did things around here that one had never known to be real jobs before, some with descriptions that did not appear in the United States Statistical Job Abstract, many with titles that were peculiar at best and which therefore bore remembering.
There were some 350 workers all together.
Phew! Talk about the vast potential for attitude problems!
There was the Lord Chamberlain (the highest-ranking Court official, whose duties of office she had encountered before), the Master of the Household, the Deputy (of what, she hadn’t a clue, but somehow she was absolutely sure that it had nothing to do with John Wayne), the Steward (supervising indoor menservants), the Housekeeper (their female counterparts).
There was the Private Secretary (who handled the press, among other things), the Keeper of the Privy Purse and Treasurer to the Queen, the Crown Equerry (who sounded as though he should have something to do with horse racing, but instead—or, at least, she thought—seemed to have something to do with all of the vehicles, both motorized and non-, that were housed over in the Royal Mews, which sounded an awful lot like something noble that the cat might have oh-so innocently—some claimed insolently?—dragged in, just prior to winking at the Queen and thereby ensuring that he would be transformed by the Master Chef into kibble for the finger-pointing Corgis… but wasn’t).
There were individual Yeomen (?) of the Gold, Silver, Glass Pantries and Wine Cellars, Under-butlers, Pages, Page of the Backstairs (the Queen’s personal servant), the Queen’s dressers and Phil’s valets.
There were four Women of the Bedchamber, which sounded like a cush job, but was, in fact, of not quite as grand a stature as being one of the two Ladies of the Bedchamber. (Talk about splitting hairs, a nasty voice in Daisy’s head was beginning to say. Did Marilyn French know about this? But then, the People magazine-reading voice in her brain took over again and, anyway, at least the Nasty Voice hadn’t been telling her to go out and shoot anybody.)
And, of course, there was only one—count them, one—Mistress of the Robes.
There were 35-40 maids, 8 male telephone operators for over 300 phones and extensions (what, no EOE?—what was wrong with letting ladies talk on the horn?), some fulltime window cleaners who lived at home (“Well, dearie, I’m off. We’re doing the Ballroom again today. Thanks for the spam sandwiches. No, tell the kiddies not to wait up; you know what a bitch all those blasted long windows can be.”), and two men who spent their entire careers caring for the 300+ clocks.
Out of the “some 350” workers (so, more people than clocks, then), about eighty of the staff actually slept in the palace, so call it an even hundred. (Daisy was already finding that it was ever-so-much easier to measure the little details of the day-to-day life around the palace, if one were mathematically daring enough to round up to the nearest hundred.) These lucky, close to a hundred, individuals were housed in attic bedrooms. And while that might not seem quite cricket, what with all of the unused spaces that seemed to be lying around the place, one could hardly put them in—oh, say—the Belgian Suite, Daisy managed to concur.
Yes, there certainly was a lot to learn around here! Daisy told herself again, as she continued with her run up and down the red lined carpet of the Principal Corridor, already experiencing the beginning stages of the disorder that any one of the palace’s 350 staff could readily diagnose as Red Carpet Fever. She thought for sure that she was feeling enchanted by it all.
Yes, as anybody with any sense could see, there was enough here—why, the sheer statistics of it all alone!—to keep even an actuary interested for quite some time.
So, how long then, do you suppose, would it hold Daisy?
2
Like a complimentary fruitcake, shipped under separate cover by a Midwestern factory specializing in the mass production of taste-free thirteen-layer Dobosch tortes, Bonita had safely arrived at the palace having traveled there under the considerable powers of her own steam. And while, like the much-maligned fruitcake, she might never put in an appearance in the number-one slot on anybody’s holiday wish list, her advent did represent a welcome change of pace. At least to Daisy’s way of thinking.
The two Americans were at the Tower of London, queuing to see the Crown Jewels. The idea for the pilgrimage had been Bonita’s brainstorm. Thinking that it was high time that her “charge” got a load of what she was letting herself in for, she also thought it best that Daisy get her glimpse of the heights that her future now held from the perspective of the rest of the little people. Thankfully, there were only now about a hundred people left ahead of them in line.
“How goes tricks for vous in the Big Pl
ace?” she asked, in an attempt to draw out her peculiarly silent companion. Bonita had taken the initials from the acronym, transforming them into something else again.
“Comme ci, comme ca,” Daisy said with an ennui-propelled shrug. Sturgess had apparently been helping her brush up on her language skills in anticipation of all of the travel she would probably be doing in the near future. “We shall see. Ca va?” The fine art of rhyming had also obviously been rearing its ugly head during those early morning tête-à-tête tutorials, although it seemed that—for now—the Bard had nothing to worry about. Except, perhaps, figuring out a way to roll some 383-year-old ashes over in one’s grave.
They were finally at the entrance to the first room that housed some of the royal trinkets. A mere prelude to the more serious stuff, as they snaked around the displays here, they saw that it was mostly just a lot of large, solid gold junk: scepters that looked as though the only king that might be physically strong enough to heft them would be a Budweiser Clydesdale, enormous platters (perhaps for serving heads on), and other stuff like that. An unbelievable show of wealth was on exhibit in that one room and it wasn’t even the main attraction. This was just bijoux foreplay as it were.
And while it was all kind of fascinating in its own useless, lifeless way, a part of Daisy couldn’t help but think of…
“World hunger?” Bonita provided, with an innocent raise of her eyebrows, as they paused in front of another solid gold platter, this one as big as a sideboard.
“Oh, shut up,” Daisy responded, testily, hastening on to the next feature.
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