He rubbed his spindly hands together.
“Your families needed me just as keenly as kings needed taxes. Think about it. Across the land were families with tender mothers, distraught at their little children’s suffering—moaning in agony. The rush lights in their hovels cast sinister shadows on the walls as if to mock the suffering of parents kept awake at night by their howling infants. Yes, their little ones were delirious.”
At that, Death parodied human inadequacy by flailing his hands, bending his shape double, holding one arm to a hip and bending backwards to signify helpless laughter.
"Fortunately for them, I was at hand—yes, me, Death the Compassionate. When I called by, I tried to tell the mothers that the suffering of her children was almost over.
“Rock-a-bye, baby in the tree top. Hush now. We’re almost there.”
To heighten his psychological teasing, this strange King Death moved into the present tense.
“But the mother doesn’t listen. She’s not capable, poor soul. She’s worn herself out with watching, weeping and wailing. Don’t laugh. It’s a crime to mock the afflicted. Let’s get it straight. Her resistance to the inescapable end—the only thing that can soothe and ease the stricken little boy or girl—is puny and futile.”
He turned away. Ginny saw an outsize emblem on the back of his cloak. She should not have been surprised. Where Edward III had a longbow, this mysterious king had a scythe. Sensing that she was taking stock of his fatal emblem, the strange king turned back towards Ginny.
“You heard my voice-over in battle, so you know what I can do. Well, in this new scenario the exhausted mother hears my voice-over during the dread sickness of her child.”
He folded his arms together and held a bundle of white cloth as if he were cradling a toddler in swaddling clothes. Then he turned back to Ginny and the mortal king.
"You cannot save him—or her. Your lullabies are a waste of time. But my lullaby is sweeter. Besides, it’s far more effective than yours.
“It’s true that with all her heart the mother wants me gone. Yet she also wants me there. Her divided feelings sharpen her agony. I’m going to take away the joy of her life and rob her family of their future. And yet at the same time, she wants her little child to be at peace. His breath is failing. Yet my breath is about to blow peace over him. At the last moment when he succumbs to my siren lullaby, his mother curses me.”
Ginny was surprised to hear herself say, “How I hate you, Death, you foul earl king.”
The face of the mother’s before her turned around and then Ginny had a nasty shock: it was her own face but thinner, dirtier, her hair coarse and matted. Ginny saw that in this illustration, she was the mother. Death continued:
But my song prevails where hers could not:
Rock-a-bye baby in the tree top,
When the breeze blows, the cradle will rock,
When the plague howls, the cradle will fall
And down come baby, cradle and all.
The child turned in his cot. It was Ginny’s brother, Georgie, younger but wan and scared to death. Ginny was beside herself at the cruel charade. She was stunned into silence.
King Edward wanted to change the bitter mood. He said, “In time, and after it had done its damage, the plague abated. Victims started to respond to treatment. The human will to survive resurfaced.”
“And this is where I come in—again,” said Death. “I’ve had what you moderns call a bad press. I admit it. Your new historians calculate—and I don’t know how they do it—that the death toll was around 50 percent of the population. With the benefit of modern research, I can tell this charming young lady that in a few short years the Black Death reduced the English population from 4.8 million to 2.6 million.”
He paused for Ginny to take breath about the toll and the breadth of the Black Death.
“But is it so perverse of me to find a silver lining within my lovely dark cloud? In the Black Death, I killed people. But I didn’t kill the material world around them. That’s something humankind does all by itself in its terrifying wars.”
King Edward felt the chill of that remark. It was as if Death was staring him in the face rather than simply peering at him furtively from under his cowl. Edward knew better than to reply. He moved the subject onto survival.
“Fortunately, the Black Death didn’t kill off humankind’s gold and silver and precious metals or its land or all its domestic animals or its social infrastructure. If you forget the human tragedies, you can consider what else happened in society. The Black Death may have killed half of the population but it doubled the ratio of everything else for the people who did survive.”
“Thus,” interrupted Death, “the mighty minuses of many deaths and the less immediately obvious pluses of more things to go around transformed society. Your modern historians say that the per capita shares of everything doubled quickly and real wages rose. Yes, the number of people working the land declined. But there were more tools, more horses and more fertile land. There was a shift to pastoral agriculture across Europe. Yes, mighty changes, mighty achievements were afoot.”
Edward III now became fascinated by the many outsize rings suddenly glittering on the gloved fingers of the partly hidden figure of King Death. The rings glowed like coals on an ebbing fire.
“You recognise these pretty rings, don’t you?” asked the cowled man.
Edward nodded with some embarrassment. The stranger continued.
“They were your rings in life. You remember Alice Perrers, the lovely lady you made friends with after dear Queen Philippa died?”
King Edward nodded grimly and said tersely, “No husband should outlive his wife; no father should outlive his son—especially his favourite and his heir—died of dysentery—as happened to me.”
“You now know that naughty Alice Perrers was a real shady lady, your dowsabel—your new fair lady. She had remarkable wit. She did not bother with such inconveniences as scruples. I don’t think she even knew the word, this naughty Alice the malice.” With more spite, the cowled man added, “She tugged these rings from your fingers as you lay dying.”
In a dark tableau that appeared flickering like an old movie on one of the abbey pillars, Ginny saw the sleeping form of Edward III laid on a royal bed covered by a new counterpane. Wearily, he released his hands from his sleeves. When he woke up, he looked down and saw that his jewels had gone: evaporated.
The man in the cowl said, “You were no longer the beard to be feared. It was all so very sad.”
Edward III hated being put down and before such a stranger as Ginny. Again, he rounded on her testily.
“I don’t think I should like America.”
Ginny’s default answer carried more bite than usual. Thinking of the ravages of Edward’s battles and courtly indifference to bubonic plague, she answered, “I suppose that’s because we have no ruins and no curiosities.”
“No ruins? You have your affordable health care. Huh? And, as for curiosities—you have your TV commercials. In the midst of news broadcasts on famine in Africa or terrorism in Asia, a so-called message about adult diapers or vaginal dryness—if you please.”
Ginny was distracted. She heard sounds of people shouting from somewhere beyond the dark sentry doorway. These sounds got ever louder. She could make out someone calling out a rhyme as if they were belting out a pop song:
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
Peering through a gap in the folds of cloth around the hollow stranger, Ginny saw a townscape of narrow roads and tumbling buildings dotted here and there with some tired-looking trees. Below them and clambering over primitive work stations with tools was a motley crew of men in homespun peasant garb.
She sensed something else. Where Edward III had shown her medieval images of war, it seemed that Death wanted her to experience the smell of it all. Even though she was some distance from the noisy group of people who were obvious grumblers, the stench was overpoweri
ng. There was rank human sweat, gross human odour, manure from man and beast and the unmistakeable pong of death—slaughtered animals being prepared for curing for food or for being turned by rough manufacture into clothing. This living crowd was defined by dirt and decay.
“It’s a centre of butchery,” said Death.
Edward III watched Ginny’s deepening sense of disgust with wry amusement. He said simply, “You’re only a visitor. You try living among these people. Yes, the lower orders have things to complain about. And we certainly meet that need by giving them even more things to complain about. They should thank us. Look again. They’re all enjoying themselves at their peasant rebellion. As I never tire of saying, ‘The peasants are revolting’!”
Before Ginny could protest on behalf of poor and dispossessed people, she got another sharp surprise.
Out of the gaping space of the cloak of Death sallied a comely youth with curly golden-red hair. He was an energetic adolescent, eager also to be up and at them. He leapt onto a handsome horse standing conveniently by. He fairly galloped up to the angry assembly. He allowed his horse to edge into the fringe of the crowd so that his horse gently muzzled with another.
This new boy king cried out, “I will be your leader. You shall have from me all you seek. Only follow me to the fields outside.”
“He’s got some nerve—facing the plebs squarely like that,” said Edward III before he faded from view. “He met the rebels at Mile End. But then, after all, he is my grandson, Richard II,” said Edward’s voice after he himself had disappeared.
TURNS OF THE SCREW
“Where’s Ginny? Where’s Georgie?”
When he awoke in the waiting room, Charlie Chancer still felt drowsy from the spiked drink. He looked around for Ginny and Georgie. Then he called out to them. Nothing: no answer; no sound at all. Cautiously, he opened the door and went into the great nave of the abbey.
Charlie knew he and his kids had all been together some hours earlier. At the suggestion of old Pippa, they had hidden in the abbey after closing. Now his kids were nowhere to be seen. Charlie did not have time to blame himself for having put them in danger—perhaps by provoking mysterious royal creatures better left undisturbed: the living dead of British royalty. He had to find his children.
As Charlie searched the nave and the two main aisles, he had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched by unseen eyes. He sensed people moving about somewhere although eyesight and common sense told him this could not be so. Yet he had a nagging doubt. He had seen enough ghost movies to make him wonder if he was now in one of them.
A familiar scenario with a surprise twist came in films in which the hero or heroine (who has captured the audience’s sympathy) senses ‘others’—seen and unseen—all around: people who are dead or ghosts but who do not know they are dead or ghosts. The surprise twist pulls the rug from under the audience’s feet by revealing that it is the sympathetic hero or heroine who is dead but that they have not yet come to terms with the fact.
Charlie was beginning to wonder if he was a human father with two children, a young son and a daughter enjoying her teenage years. Was he surrounded by the living dead? Or were these half-heard sounds and snatches figments of his imagination? Or was he, himself, a figment of the feverish imagination of sights unseen? He had a moment of comfort when he saw the bust of William Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner in the abbey and remembered words the playwright gives savage slave Caliban in The Tempest:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Confused, stumped, Charlie thought he should check the secret waiting room again in case Ginny and Georgie had gone back there.
Inside, he found the furniture rearranged and not for the better. And a modest, middle-aged man with frizzy grey hair was ready for him.
“Welcome, liebchen,” said the man with a German accent. “I think I can help you. I’m sorry the room is such a mess. As they used to say in Hollywood films, ‘It’s the maid’s day off’. You’ve mislaid both your children. Misfortune or carelessness? Well, let’s see.”
Charlie stole a glance back at the eighteenth-century portraits on the walls in case he could marry the face of one of these to the man in front of him. They looked so different—perhaps it was because the men and women in the portraits wore white wigs while this man had a modern, if untidy, hairstyle, and he was wearing a crumpled grey suit.
“Sit yourself down; rest yourself comfortably,” said the man kindly, indicating the chaise longue. “There, that’s better, liebchen,” he continued as Charlie sat down. Then he adjusted Charlie’s legs so that he was reclining. The man took a notepad from the table and sat behind him.
“My name is George—just like your little boy. But please call me ‘Psy’.”
“It’s just like a scene from an old Hollywood movie,” Charlie thought. “A psychiatrist sits behind a client, asks questions and prompts his patient to divulge deep secrets. He gets them to dredge up inner desires and needs, supposedly to find ways to resolve them. It’s as if I’m on an operating table.”
“I’m here to help you help yourself, liebchen. How did you come to be here? You’ve heard of the turn of the screw in ghost stories?”
Indeed Charlie had. He knew that in an ambiguous story by American novelist Henry James with that very title the atmosphere and tension of a ghost story is increased when it involves a child. When there are two children, another turn of the screw ratchets up the tension even more.
Charlie gulped but tried to suppress it.
“We came here not simply to see the sights in London town. It was also my attempt to bond better with my kids and to get the two of them to bond with one another,” he began, unprompted.
“To put your past behind you by losing yourself in another past?”
“Right. My first wife, Genna, and I were blissfully happy. Then she was killed in a random, senseless act of violence by a lone psycho.”
“Yes, I heard about it.”
“My mother cried so much. She couldn’t stop. She asked my dad, ‘How is it possible that someone can cry so much?’ He told her, ‘Well, most of your body is water’.”
“And you?”
“After Genna’s death, I plunged myself into work. It was my way of coping. ‘Conventional alpha male response’ was what my mother called it. You see, I left bringing up and looking after young Ginny to my father and mother. They were willing but this took its toll on two elderly people.”
“And Ginny?”
“I tried never to sugar-coat what had happened but I failed.”
Charlie paused, took a deep breath and continued, “Then I met someone. I was reckless. I hoped for help and salvation from my memories and my responsibilities from this young woman: Honey Pharaoh. She was an office temp; a lovely blonde. Thinking back, it was unfair of me. I asked too much of her. But I would never tell her that.”
“What happened?”
"Holly wasn’t a native New Yorker. She was from the boondocks in Florida. She was enticed, over-excited by the variety and energy of New York. And a love affair with me was part of her delusional package. Honey was all over me when all she could see was being loved up. She told me I was a gorgeous male. I wanted to believe her, so I did. She said she adored the way my hair curled. When we exercised in the gym together, she made it obvious she was admiring my pecs, my washboard abs and my biceps. When we made love, she said she had never known such ecstasy. She meant it as a compliment—that I was an experienced lover. I’d been with other women—she liked that—and so I knew how to please her. And I did, too.
“I don’t know how I could have been so foolish. But it wasn’t simple vanity. I needed Honey not just for myself but for Ginny. Looking back on it, I think Honey was bold. She even said she welcomed the idea of being a trophy wife to a rising Wall Street star in commodities. After all, my reputation was not only for being willing to take risks on margins but also being dextero
us at it. I was—I am—good.”
Charlie did not notice Psy George getting alert at that last remark.
“I think Honey assumed that what a trophy wife had to do was to keep her wicked figure trim by regular exercise in the gym after dining out in fancy East Side restaurants. She promised to love Ginny as one of her own. Her words still ring in my ears: ‘I will be a mother to her, never evil-eyed, always loving and true’. Words are easy and cheap. Yes, Honey was all over Ginny—until we got married.”
“Then your breakfast roll with a honey came to a sticky end? You discovered that expensive wedding breakfasts leave a bitter aftertaste, etcetera, etcetera. Liebchen, marriage is like going into battle.”
“You got that right. I was a chancer through and through but that wasn’t enough to get me and Ginny out of the mess I’d put us in. After the everyday chores of marriage sapped Honey’s will to make the marriage work—and when young Georgie came along—her whole focus shifted to making Georgie’s future her priority.”
“Did the end come with a crisis?” Psy George asked knowingly.
“Yes,” Charlie answered directly. "Honey hated Ginny—not because she came from a previous love but because she could not penetrate—and far less appropriate—my cherished earlier experience.
“Honey felt excluded and there was nothing she could do about it. Worse, in her jealous mind’s eye, she had been expected to raise and love Ginny as one of her own. When she had touched Ginny before—when we were married—it was with controlled squeamishness as much as because Ginny belonged to Genna and me as because Ginny was a mixed race child.”
Psy George paused. He had never had to deal with a problem of race. All he knew was that there were slaves in the colonies. He did not like to think of them as people. And his own beloved wife was no longer at his side to help him sort it out. Before he could take stock, Charlie said abruptly, “When Honey Pharaoh hit Ginny, it was the last straw.”
“Hit her?”
“Yes, gave her a wallop for caring for Georgie in his bath.”
Midnight in Westminster Abbey Page 6