Midnight in Westminster Abbey

by Sean Dennis Cashman

  As the four half-seen figures conversed, once again came Charlie’s pre-rehearsed question and answer that he had suggested to his kids.

  “I don’t think I should like America,” said one of the women in an odd dialect that sounded both French and Scottish.

  “I suppose that’s because we have no ruins and no curiosities,” Georgie answered on cue just as Charlie had advised him to do.

  “No ruins?” came the reply. “What about American foreign policy? No curiosities? You have your American graffiti.”

  Charlie smiled despite the seriousness of the situation. At least Georgie was alive and in good spirits.

  The little Tudor tableau with young Georgie evaporated.

  Thinking back to The King and I and the two tableaux he had seen of his children gave Charlie an interpretative nudge: it seemed in the two separate scenarios Ginny was in ‘The Kings and I’ with the Plantagenets and Georgie was in ‘The Queens and I’ with the Tudors. This inkling gave Charlie the comforting idea that the whole night was some theatrical charade that must surely come to an end, wouldn’t it?

  As to his immediate problem, Charlie could not help comparing the Charles II before him (off-duty as it were), with Charles II in his famous portraits. As in his portrait on the playing card, they showed Charles II with luxurious flowing wig, upper-crust court dress and cold, penetrating eyes and curling opulent lips. This man now wearing nondescript western clothes could be an FBI operative; even a KGB agent from the Old Soviet Union or a throwback fugitive from the former East Germany’s disbanded secret police, the infamous Stasi.

  Charlie was not going to cower any longer before a spirit no matter how immortal.

  “Do what you must with me but let my children go.”

  “I don’t think so. You brought them here. You. Not us. You dared to enter our private world. Well, play by the rules. Your children are our pawns, our hostages. You want to see them free. Right? Then you work out how that can be. We are eternal spirits but our power is limited. Enter another world and start to learn how it works just as well as it does. That is something that puzzles everyone in your supposed democracies. They don’t want to admit their limitations in global capitalism. You’re not very good at fighting wars in foreign countries that you don’t understand, are you ? ”

  Charlie knew this was true but he could not even manage a smile.

  “Well, that’s just modern arrogance,” said the ersatz Charles II tartly. “You put yourself in the position of trying to get what you wanted out of a parallel world. See how you do. Let’s get you started.”

  The man held up the thin carton box that had held the playing cards. Out fell a leaflet that he handed to Charlie. It offered advice and instructions printed out from an entry on the worldwide web.

  “Read it,” said Charles II. Charlie read the paper.

  **“Game theory** is the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.”

  And lower down the page. “Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science and psychology, as well as logic, computer science, biology and poker.”

  Charlie racked his brains. Hard. Had there not been some recent press story, widely circulated, about how a distinguished professor had applied a simple game sometimes associated with con men to the way political and economic movements operated? And had he not won some prestigious international prize for it? Charlie thought hard again. With the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences going to game theorist Jean Tirole in 2014, wasn’t it true that by now, eleven game-theorists had won the economics Nobel Prize?

  Charlie was perspiring so much; it was like a fever.

  Charles II noticed that and smiled again, ever so generously.

  “Don’t get yourself in a sweat. Don’t catch the plague. They say it can prove fatal. It carried off my niece, Mary II. Her funeral music by someone or other turned out to be the most lasting legacy of her reign.”

  “Henry Purcell,” thought Charlie, “and with more immortal artistic legacy than any Stuart king or queen.”

  The merry monarch turned back from the queen mouse that had soared musically after her death to the mischievous magic of games and game theory.

  “How does the argument go? Let’s see. Imagine this. You are playing a guessing game as to which upturned cone of three cones a dice or a small nut is in. You’ve just seen the hustler in the plaza in Covent Garden or on the Deuce in 42nd Street in your Manhattan show you under which little paper cone he placed the dice or nut. He put the mark in the first cone. Then he moved the three cones and shuffled them around quickly. Fast as lightning. He invited you to take a practice run. You guessed correctly. The mark was now under the third cone.”

  The king’s story was vivid. For a moment, Charlie could see the northwest corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan with the errant kings of Westminster Abbey as street hustlers and the older queens as bag ladies. Charles II brought him up sharp.

  “Then the hustler said he would give you ten pounds or ten dollars if you guessed where he put the mark next. But you were not going to get ten dollars or pounds for nothing. You had to gamble ten dollars or pounds of your own money. If you guessed correctly, you would get your ten pounds back, plus ten dollars or pounds from the hustler. Twenty pounds or dollars altogether. But ten of those pounds or dollars were yours anyway! But if your guess was wrong, you would lose your money. The risk was too great, certainly for a reward as piffling as ten pounds.”

  Of course, Charlie had seen something similar practiced by a street hustler in the market area around Covent Garden in London the day before. He had told his kids never to take a chance with a street hustler. Whatever they promised, you would always lose.

  This sudden torment brought horrible memories flooding across Charlie’s fevered brain. This was not the first time he had been put at a psychological disadvantage by malign personal forces. The last time had come courtesy of the manipulative enemy in his bed: Honey Pharaoh. True, she had hit Ginny (when Ginny was bathing Georgie) so hard that she had damaged her ear. True, this mindless act of cruelty had brought the guillotine down on the Chancers’ unhappy marriage. But Honey, who was no genius when it came to marital mind games, had a ruthless advantage. She was a man-eater. Charlie had not been there when the ear doctor, Ray Zoltan, examined Ginny’s serious injury. But he felt the bitter outcome.

  Charlie’s tortuous feelings of being hemmed in an unforgiving situation were being ratcheted up another notch by his nasty recollections of being outwitted by his ex-wife. Round and round it went in his mind what she had done, how unwitting he had been—so short-sighted that it had made him feel guilty over Ginny’s injury—and the near-loss of Georgie.

  He could not help himself churning the horrible set of incidents around in his mind:

  "It was for correct procedure (legally speaking) that I wasn’t there when damnable Dr Zoltan examined Ginny in the Milhous College hospital so that the medical assessment was impartial. But neither was I there when Honey—damn her—turned the sexual wiles she had once practiced on me onto the gullible but oh-so-horny Dr Zoltan. And that was a costly mistake. In return for bestowing on him the ultimate in hospitality that afternoon and later, night after night, Honey persuaded him, inch by inch, that Ginny’s injury was an unfortunate accident—horrible, yes, but genuinely accidental. Then she made this Dr Doolittle believe that it was mental cruelty on my part that had made her so jittery that she had accidents—hence Ginny’s unfortunate injury.

  “So, just when I thought that I had all the best cards for our divorce, she trumped me with her loathsome ace in the hole: an ultra-hypocritical doctor up for an easy lay. In no time at all, they were an item, ringing wedding bells on the basis of her financial settlement from our divorce. Damnable Dr Zoltan used his older colleagues in the university hospital (who knew all about divorce settlements) to make sure Honey got the best financial advice during the divorce hearings. Afterwards, he got the bes
t legal advice to ensure she got her way in cutting Georgie out of my life.”

  Charlie could hear himself going on and on. He knew he was ranting internally. It was stupid. Worse, it was useless and pathetic.

  But survivor Charlie knew he had to pull himself together for the sake of his kids. And, although he had not had the last laugh in the farrago of the divorce, he had begun an ominous payback in which he forged solidarity with disadvantaged American dads across the United States. His route was always morally superior. And he always found stinging last words in his sallies.

  Charlie knew he had to take a grip on himself, to try and think logically and not dwell on his overwhelming emotional need for his kids. That way his searing emotional wants would take over and he would not be able to think rationally. How did this little game apply to his present situation? What was he being asked to do to get his children back?

  With implied menace, Charles II wanted Charlie to dig deep into the unstated implications of this nasty game.

  Without saying anything more, Charles II rose quietly and disappeared as magically as he had first appeared, leaving Charlie alone with his thoughts. Charlie was thinking as keenly as could any man who knew he was out of his depth. He now understood that the Times Square and Covent Garden hustlers’ games posed a profound question. On the surface, it was whether you, as the tool or the victim, should take a risk for ten dollars or ten pounds of your money to win another ten dollars or ten pounds. How much were you willing to risk to get what you wanted.

  And in history, how great, how high, did the reward have to be for you to risk ten dollars or ten pounds? So in great historical struggles such as the ones over the Protestant Reformation; for universal male suffrage; for woman suffrage; for freedom from slavery; for civil rights for African-Americans in the US; for black South Africans under apartheid; for workers’ rights whether in US labor unions or UK trade unions, how high, how good did the results have to be?

  Surely, the equivalent of a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars? No, far more. For if you were fighting for the independence of your country from a foreign power or from slavery or for civil rights, how much were you ready to sacrifice?—fighting not only for liberty but also for your life and perhaps fighting with your life?

  And was the end result worthwhile?

  What might be the full or final sacrifice?

  Then, what about the other side? For against all freedom fighters, there stood powerful opponents. For universal suffrage, for votes, it might be the entire dominant establishment class or the monarchy before the French and Russian revolutions. It might be an oligarchy of nobles against the peasants in the Middle Ages. It might be a theocracy as in Galileo or Luther’s struggles with the Roman Catholic Church. And both against the humans in the Planet of the Apes film series. For slaves wanting freedom it would be the slave owners, the plantation owning class. For civil rights in the southern states and in South Africa, it would be the self-satisfied oligarchy of a closed society.

  Whatever the cause, it would not only be the king, the kaiser, the tsar or the state against you. For the opposition in charge would put the whole of their resources against you. So, for the high-and-mighty opposition in charge the stakes were also high. Give an inch and any insurgency movement would take a mile. Make any concession and the insurgents would be emboldened: serfs against the tsar, industrial workers against the bosses, plebs and peasants against the aristocrats, slaves against their owners, republicans against the monarchy, partisans in countries invaded and controlled by Nazi armies or Soviet dictators—even against British territorial imperialists or American economic imperialists [Charlie shuddered here], nationalists in countries owned economic-body and freedom-fighting soul by a foreign empire, today’s western left-behinders against global capitalists and repressive liberalism. Was that the rub, the sticking point?

  So, it seemed that the stakes were just as high for the establishment as for their opponents.

  How did Charlie’s personal problem fit into this scheme?

  Another handsome man with a winning smile and lank dark hair in the stylish way of glossy ads for consumer products spoke as he emerged from the shadows: “You don’t have to feel trapped just because you’ve mislaid something or other or got lost yourself. Just follow the sign.”

  This new man tugged at his tiny gold earring. His dark shadow from designer stubble made him devilishly attractive. Charlie did not give this more than a second thought—forgetting where he might have seen him earlier. This was because, on one of the abbey pillars, Charlie now saw a white sign with green lettering declaring ENTRANCE-EXIT. He had not noticed it before. He went up to it to inspect it and somehow found himself inside the pillar. It seemed to open into a dark passage. He fumbled his way forward. He came to a wooden door with an iron bolt. He could feel its heavy metal shape. He pushed it. And, just as suddenly, he was outside the great west door of Westminster Abbey. The little door had disappeared.

  All Charlie could see as he looked upwards was the cold stonework of the two great west towers designed by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Then he heard someone sniggering. The easily identifiable voice of false psychiatrist George II asked, “Where do you get these people?”

  “I have my wiles,” answered the second unctuous voice that Charlie recognised immediately as belonging to Mr Slime, aka Charles II. “Besides, what do you care? He’s an easy mark. We have his kids. He wants them back. And he has the skills we need for later.”

  Charlie did not understand what was going on but he was livid. And his incomprehension and fury were at war with one another. He banged on the great doors.

  “This isn’t a game. My children are beautiful. They’re the most important people in the world to me. This isn’t some malign soap opera. It’s our lives—our real lives.”

  He banged uselessly on the stonework. Then again came that derisive laugh.

  “Important to you? But you didn’t think of that before, did you?” said Mr Slime with such scathing insistence as to further ratchet up Charlie’s tension.

  Without wanting to admit it even to himself, Charlie knew he had been tricked. He had been ejected from the abbey with no hope of getting in to search for his children until daytime and opening hours. He broke into a cold sweat. There was nothing to do but pull himself together and wait. His mind was more alert for every flicker of light, every sound, any sense of movement.

  He slumped at the foot of one of the great towers. Then he saw a strange sight. He thought his heart would miss a beat.

  A figure in heavy armour trundled from the north, walking clumsily along as if it were not used to walking at all. In its right hand, it held riding reins and led a horse that was just as strange. The horse seemed to have been cast in black metal but it moved proudly as if it had plenty of energy in reserve for galloping into battle. The armed man and the metallic horse stopped in front of the great west door as if it was for the world to wait for them.

  Charlie stood up and stayed perfectly still. No matter how silent he thought he was, the metal horse reared its head and looked him up and down. By the way it rolled its eyes, Charlie sensed it was trying to tell him something:

  “You want to get back into Westminster Abbey. So do we. Wait for us. When I give you a signal, walk alongside me. The folks in there don’t know how many legs a superhorse has. They won’t notice you beside me. You’ll be back inside before they know it.”

  This was how Charlie interpreted the strange horse’s silent advice. He stood next to the horse and its would-be rider. The man who had just now mounted the horse noticed nothing. It was as if he was an actor waiting for his cue to go on stage, concentrating so much on his entrance that he was oblivious to everything but getting into the abbey.

  As Charlie waited anxiously, his mind raced over and over some of malign game theories. He wanted to stay alert to be ready for his cue to move back into the abbey but he could not. Round and round in his head they went, the tantalising games and problems.
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br />   So, what was Charlie’s dilemma? The royals he had outraged by invading their space wanted to show him who was in control. How far had he to go, or to give, to get his children back? Apologise? Grovel? No, these spirits wanted more. He remembered Sophie’s Choice, a movie with Meryl Streep based on a novel. She was a victim of the Holocaust, a prisoner of the Nazis, forced into a bitter choice. The Nazis forced her to choose between her two dear children. She could save only one child and condemn the other. Charlie could not stop shivering.

  Charlie knew this encounter with the silent armoured man and the equally silent but so-eloquent black horse might be his only chance of getting back to his children and that he had better fall in with the plan of his unexpected allies.

  THE TWO FACES OF RICHARD II

  Still in the fanciful world of medieval London, Ginny saw that, once Richard II’s youthful moment of spontaneous compassion during the Peasants’ Revolt was over, the little tableau at Mile End looked faded and worn although it did not disappear. The dark figure standing next to Ginny let his cloak with its cowl hood fall decorously to the ground. The smell of decay lingered. It was waste and mould together, like rotten vegetables.

  The man who stood before her was an older version of the youthful Richard II on horseback from the previous tableau.

  He was not only now grown up but he also had a face saddened by ill fortune and loss of power. He was wearing what looked like a simple priest’s cassock of homespun wool. It had been dyed royal blue long ago but was now so faded that its colour was a grungy blue-grey. Instead of his former initials ‘GP’, Ginny saw his new embroidered badge: ‘RII’.

  “Why don’t I wear black, I hear you think. Well in our time the rare colour blue was the preferred mourning colour of us Royals,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Before Ginny could get over her surprise, he added, “My proudest moment came then—at Mile End. Even my many uncles were fearful of the Peasants’ Revolt. But I had the energy and optimism of youth. Besides, I wanted a day outside the court. Before they could stop me, I cantered out on my horse to the peasants’ gathering. Did you see me just now? I called out, ‘Follow me! I will be your leader’. And do you know what? They believed me.”