The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Any word from the Bright Lights?” asked Mrs. Warboys from the doorway.

  Pickard crumpled up the ticker tape. “Nothing today, my love, but you know what they say: no news is good news.”

  “Why do they say that?” Mrs. Warboys said. “It’s never been true.”

  The royal train halted at signals outside Roper Junction. Henry tried not to be seen checking his pocket watch, but everyone knew there was no time left for unforeseen delays.

  “Now, Cissy, remember what Mr. Crew said,” Miss March fussed. “Confine yourself to those little phrases Mr. Henry has taught you. A wave of the hand. An inclining of the head. Let Mr. Crew do the rest. He is the actor.”

  Oskar chimed in: “You an old lady, Missy Cissy. No one don’ arx nothin’ of no old-lady queen.”

  Sweeting agreed. “Yeah. Let Everett string them greeners.”

  “Be great in act, as you have been in thought,” Curly declaimed, taking hold of Cissy’s hands.

  “Wish these signals would change,” muttered George, reaching for his watch and remembering, for the fiftieth time, that he had lost it in the river.

  The train gave a violent lurch and rolled forward. The royal entourage squeezed through into the second coach—”Good luck, Missy Cissy!”—leaving the Queen and Prime Minister and American Ambassador to a lonely dignity in the lead coach.

  “You give ’em what for, Missy Cissy!”

  “Co robimy? Niemam mojej deski,” said Max, who was under the impression that they were about to put on a show.

  “At least we’ll die with harness on our back!”

  Everett shot to his feet with clenched fists and bawled, “Curlitz, do me an immeasurable favor, will you, and stop quoting from danged Macbeth!”

  (He was, after all, an actor.)

  Returning to the jailhouse to report to Cyril, Kookie was almost cheerful. But when he called out under the prison window—”Mr. Crew! Mr. Cyril Crew? Listen up!”—there was no answer.

  Figures were hurrying past the end of the alleyway, all in the direction of the station—“They’re here! She’s coming!”—but Kookie was too busy looking for something to stand on so as to see in at the cell window. When he finally found a galvanized bucket, turned it upside down, and stood on it, tiptoe, he peered in on an empty cell. A screw of blanket, a torn jacket, a strewing of shorn hair all said that the condemned man had been fetched away by his executioners.

  Everett got down first. At least he scrambled as far as the bottom of the steps. It was impossible to get any farther. The train was besieged.

  Nowhere is there a truer bunch of Stars-and-Stripes, democratic Americans than in Roper Junction. Yet the rumor of visiting royalty brought them out like ants at a picnic. In ten years of selling tickets, the man in the railway-station booth had never sold so many tickets. Someone had even strung bunting across railway property. With elbows out, with umbrellas, parasols, and walking sticks to hand, the town’s citizens crammed the platform as the little two-carriage train came in.

  “What in blue blazes is going on?” demanded the bank manager, passing the station gate, but the porter he asked was standing on his handcart, craning to see over the heads of the crowd.

  The Mayor himself could not make his way through the crowd until the Sheriff fired his pistol to get everyone’s attention. The Queen—who had just appeared in the carriage doorway—flinched visibly. The crowd roared its disapproval and the Sheriff was jostled, the pistol snatched out of his hand.

  The Mayor was flustered: he had been cleaning his boots, ready for the hanging, when he heard the news, and had just realized that his hands were covered in brown polish. “Welcome! Welcome, ma’am!” he called, still worming his way toward the front of the crowd. “’Pologies for that. Hope my Sheriff didn’t alarm you.”

  Crew stepped forward to deflect the question. “Not at all, sir. It is just that some anarchist took a shot at Her Majesty recently and the sound of pistols still . . .

  excites her. . . . How very good of you all to turn out. However did you—”

  “Good day,” said Queen Victoria, taking one step down.

  Delighted, the Mayor reached out a hand, remembered the boot polish, and withdrew it. Their hands dodged each other. “Hoon! Mayor Hoon! Hector Hoon, Mayor of this fine town!”

  The occupants of the second carriage were causing a stir. Two black men in straw boaters were an exoticism they had not been expecting. A third appeared soon after, still tying his tie.

  “Her Majesty is making a private tour of the area,” said Everett. “Permit me to introduce Her Majesty’s Prime Minister . . .”

  “The Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone,” said Henry, being the only one who could remember the whole mouthful.

  “And this here is my American Ambassador, Sir Everett,” the Queen chipped in, “and this here’s the Polish one.”

  “Przyjemne miasto. Och, chciałbym, mieć móją deskę!”

  “This is Chancellor Curlitz, and these all—well, mustn’t bore you—other bits of government. Those three yonder are my good friends Mr. Sweeting, Mr. Benet, and Mr. Oskar. They come to my place in Windsor a couple of years back with Mr. Hatherley’s Traveling Minstrel Show, and they told me sooo much about Missouri and the river ’n’ all that I fair longed to see it for myself. Ask them nice and they may give you a song later. So if we could just squeeze on through . . . ?”

  The Prime Minister and the American Ambassador looked at each other, rattled by the unexpected crowds, nonplussed by Cissy’s sudden willingness to speak. Mayor Hoon wiped his palms vigorously on the seat of his trousers and shook the Queen warmly by the hand. “Oof, Mr. Mayor Hoon, mind the artheritees,” said the Queen. Then the crowd drew in its stomachs, children, and skirts and made way for Victoria, Queen of England, and for various bits of her government and minstrelsy, all four hundred falling in behind, like a school of dolphins following a yacht.

  “Ain’t she tiny” someone could be heard to say.

  “Heard tell she was,” said another. “Child sized, I heard.”

  “Kinda round, too.”

  “Muffins,” said some sage scholar of English practices. “Eat wagonloadsa muffins, them English.”

  The tour took in the church and the bank, the school and the civic assembly rooms (though it said DANCE HALL over the door). It stopped at the cloth and wool shop. . . .

  “What did she say? What did she ask you?”

  “Asked me what’s the colora damson. ‘What color would you call damson?’ she said to me. Be able to tell my grandchildren: Queen of England once asked me what color’s damson!”

  And the fairground:

  “Such a pity there is no fair, Mayor Hoon. We are partial to candy apples at Ballymoral.”

  It paused at the newspaper offices for a photograph of the entire royal party with Mayor, Sheriff, corn merchant, editor, and assorted wives. The wives spent the time urgently whispering to one another about what they ought to present to the Queen as a memento of her visit. It was exactly what the Queen wanted to overhear. Now she would be able to ask for the pardon and release of Cyril Crew.

  “I see no barbershop,” George observed.

  “No! Sorry. Barber died of the sweating sickness back in eighty-one. Sorry. Was Her Majesty looking to . . .”

  “No, I don’t shave, and I don’t hold with bloodletting. They got new treatments out East, you know? George is my trade person. He’s runnin’ a survey, is all,” the Queen explained.

  They moved on to the hotel:

  “I fear I cannot stay over the night, can I, Chancellor Curlitz?”

  “No, ma’am. The President is expecting us.”

  “Oh it’s all right, Sheriff. Don’t you go worrying on my account. There’s a little bed on the train with two mattresses and a toothmug with a thing on it—lion and a unicorn.”

  Even the grain silo benefited from a royal visit. The Queen seemed overwhelmed with emotion for a moment by the Roper Junction grain silo, and the Americ
an Ambassador stepped closer in case she was going to faint. “You take care of that,” said Queen Victoria at last. “I know some lovely people back in London got flattened by one of those.” Every word she spoke was relayed backward through the crowd in a surf surge of whispers. On this occasion, the women all gasped and put hands to their mouths and looked up at the tip of the grain silo and said, “How awful.” Ambassador Everett took the Queen’s arm and escorted her across the dark band of shadow cast by the silo. The shadow was long. The sun was in decline.

  The Sheriff and Mayor Hoon put their heads together in murmured panic. “. . . hardly a fittin’ sight for . . .”

  “But people come specially to see it . . .”

  “ . . . can postpone till tomorrow, surely . . .”

  “But we already shaved and tied him!”

  Cissy felt Everett Crew’s arm go rigid inside hers. She squeezed it as hard as she knew how.

  The Sheriff and Mayor Hoon had just agreed between them to hide the execution from the Queen’s delicate gaze when a boy with startled red hair rushed the royal party and asked Victoria, “You staying on for the hangin’, Majesty?” Kookie added with massive emphasis: “Because it’s happening NOW!”

  The Queen stopped dead. The crowd behind piled into each other: a raucous starling flock of noise. Flushed with embarrassment, the Sheriff dispatched the boy with the toe of his boot. The crowd was torn by the desire to be in two places at one time.

  The Sheriff selected the nicest words to phrase it—like choosing chocolates. “A felon is due to receive his just reward this evening, Your Majesty. Of the throttling variety.”

  “But we’ll keep it discreet!” Mayor Hoon put in hastily.

  “Oh, pray don’t!” snapped Everett, catching every-one off guard. “Her Majesty takes a keen interest in the administration of justice.” Then he forged ahead, in the direction the boy with red hair was heading. The Queen had to break into a trot.

  And there it was, as if to make it all real—the stage on which the last act of the tragedy was to be played out. The scaffold. The noose.

  The happy crowd was in fiesta mood by this time. They fell quiet only when Cyril Crew was brought out, but their silence was an eager, breathless excitement. His hands tied behind his back, his glory of white hair shorn down to the roots, he stumbled slightly on the sidewalk steps. A tetchy wind was catching and snatching at clothes, at bunting, at hats, at dust and street litter. The crowd looked jumpy with excitement, lids narrowed against the dust, slipping their eyes to and fro, wanting to watch both Queen and prisoner, wanting to see how queens behave at hangings. They were proud. They were proud like cats laying a chewed mouse at the feet of their visitor and looking for praise.

  “Now if you were thinking in terms of a gift . . . ,”

  Ambassador Everett observed to the Mayor’s wife, “the thing that would rejoice Her Majesty more than anything . . .”

  “Oh, but we have it! We have it!” she squeaked, and flapped her hands at the other ladies as if directing sheep, sending them running to fetch from the grocery store the present they had decided upon: a crate of damson jam and a gingham bag of fresh muffins.

  Cyril Crew, like a ship lost in fog, fixed his eyes on the one star showing. His gaze locked with Everett’s, and neither brother was capable of looking away.

  “In England it is Clemency Day,” said Chancellor Curlitz abruptly. “It dates back to Agincourt, when the monarch spared the life of one Sir Clement . . . doesn’t it, sir?”

  “Muffins. My favorite,” said Queen Victoria, staring into the gingham bag, aghast.

  “Ah yes, Clemency Day!” piped Lady May March, governess to the royal princesses.

  “What? Yes. Quite,” said Everett. “Clemency Day. If she were in England now, Her Majesty would pardon one prisoner. . . .”

  “Wouldn’t pardon this skunk,” said the Sheriff with the heartiest of belly laughs. “This one’s scum. Food fit for the Devil to chew on. Go on, Walt!” The hangman shook out a cloth bag to put over Cyril’s head.

  Everett reached into his pocket for his wife’s pearl-handled pistol. He wished it were a revolver; he wished it were Sugar Cain’s pepper-box pistol—a weapon capable of scaring the excellent people of Roper Junction into headlong flight, rather than a one-shot lady’s pistol and not even loaded. But sooner than stand and watch, stand and watch . . . Question was, if he stormed the scaffold now—if he were to grab the hangman, Walter, and hold him hostage while Cyril made his getaway—huh! faint hope!—what would the others do? Would they embroil themselves in his guilt? Would he incriminate them? Would he take them all down with him?

  Cyril, despite his best resolve, snatched his head aside as Walt came at him with the bag. “I appeal to the Queen for justice!” he cried, and his once-booming voice barely had the strength to carry the distance.

  The Mayor was appalled: a blot on a perfect visit! An affront to the best guest Roper Junction had ever entertained! He signaled to Walter to silence the prisoner, and Walt punched Cyril in the kidneys and felled him to his knees. Beside Cissy, Everett staggered as if the blow had struck him. He involuntarily brought his hand out of his pocket, and she clearly saw the pistol in it and shunted sideways to cover his hand with her huge dress. He put the gun away but moved toward the ladder. The Queen, though, was clinging to his arm, pulling back with all her weight.

  “Let the prisoner speak!” she declared, as serenely and loudly as she could. “Does he want a pardon?”

  “What he wants is horsewhipping and haltering,” retorted the Mayor in a mortification of embarrassment. He actually rushed over to the ladder, climbed it, and personally grabbed the lever to open the trapdoor beneath Cyril’s feet—except that Cyril was not on his feet but his knees, and half on, half off the hatch. The Mayor gestured wildly for Walter to put a swift end to this social gaffe. The prisoner made to speak, but the hood blotted out whatever he had to say.

  “What was his crime?” called Curly, overly loud and sharp, grabbing for extra seconds.

  “Gunned down a lawman—family man with three children. Wounded another two. Scum, like I said,” gabbled the Sheriff, and the crowd mooed in agreement.

  Everett made a show of leaning over to advise the Queen. “Whatever I do next, disown me,” he whispered, and wrenched his arm free.

  “No! Never!”

  It was the Queen’s tone that startled everyone: not hysterical so much as quizzical. All faces turned toward her. Even Everett stopped in his tracks. “Well?” said the Queen uppishly. “Just look at his head! That’s just an scientific impossib . . . impossi . . .

  bleness. Sir George! Where’s Sir George? There you are. Advise me, Sir George!”

  George the barber fleered with alarm. No one had told him he would have to act, would have to speak! No one had given him a script! The whites of his eyes showed, and he seemed on the point of breaking into a run.

  “You know more than I do, course. But I ask you, Sir George, is that . . . was that the skull of a killer? Let us take a look, what say?”

  “Ah,” said George to gain time. “Aha.”

  “Bring the prisoner here, I say!” commanded Queen Victoria.

  From the top of the scaffold ladder, unable to see or hear, Cyril Crew was toppled, dragged, and manhandled over to the royal party, forced into a crouch at the Queen’s feet. The American Ambassador wrenched off the hood with surprising urgency, and his fist closed on the prisoner’s shirt.

  To the sound of a hundred indrawn breaths, the Queen frowned into the face of the prisoner, then pulled off her gloves, placed the fingers of two hands on his head, and actually began to . . . feel it all over.

  “Ah! Aha!” George shouted, confidence washing over him in a flood. “Phrenology!”

  Everett was quick as a wink, though his mouth was so dry that he stumbled over the words. “Yes! Her Majesty . . . expert! Judge . . . can judge a man’s . . .

  unerringly! His character. Right down to whether he takes tea in his milk.
”

  “Chooses all her ministers of state that way,” said Chancellor Curlitz. Moving forward, taking off his hat, he dipped his own head proudly in all directions, to show off the shapeliness of his bald skull.

  “Firmness . . . benevolence . . . amativeness . . . ,” chirped George, as the Queen ran her hands over the various territories of the skull—the phrenologist’s classroom globe. “Sublimity . . . gravity . . . memory . . .

  inhabitiveness . . . friendship . . . ,” he recited, as she stroked, with sweat-sticky palms, the brow, cranium, ears, and terrible haircut of Cyril’s trembling skull.

  Cissy thought she had never touched anything so terrifyingly alive.

  “She is magnificent,” said Everett Crew, recovering that same sonorous voice that had thrown a pavilion of stars over the heads of a thousand audiences. “Her Majesty is never wrong!”

  By comparison, the voice of the Queen herself was tiny, almost childlike. “From the shape of this skull, gentlemen, I’d swear the worst thing this man ever done was to ride a train without a ticket.”

  This time the gasp came from the jurors at Cyril’s trial and the lawmen who had tried to beat a confession out of him beforehand. It was the exact thing—the only thing—the prisoner had confessed to.

  “Point of fact, this man’s as clever as that Solomon in the Bible, and I frankly wish I could have him in my government!”

  The sweat on the Queen’s face was such that her veil had begun to stick to her cheeks, her top lip, her forehead. Even the crabbed wind could not pick it free anymore. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Cavaleras County seemed to have jumped into her throat and blocked it. If she opened her mouth again, she was sure she would spew up ball bearings. The quartet (three quarters of it) saved her from trying. They broke into song.

  While the crowd whispered and sighed and sang along; while the hangman sneaked a cigarette; while the sweat poured down Cissy’s rib cage and froze in the small of her back, the American Ambassador, the Prime Minister of England, Chancellor Curlitz, and the governess to the royal princesses closed in on Mayor and Sheriff.