Midnight in Westminster Abbey

by Sean Dennis Cashman

  As he said this, the portly monarch laid his knobbly hands on Charlie’s shoulders and pressed him down further on the spindly metal chair in front of a desk. Charlie tried to take comfort in the slight hope that this surprisingly tense George II must surely be a figment of Charlie’s own imagination. For even in separation from his dear children a second time, not for a moment did Charlie think he was wrong not to doubt the existence of ghosts. True, the living did not know if there was an afterlife even if devout people did believe in an afterlife of the spirit. Charlie thought that human beings and animals lived their lives with such energy—even the lazy ones—that surely all that energy could not evaporate—dissipate into nothingness—when their bodies gave up life.

  Yet the answer to Charlie’s acute dilemma of how to find his real children in these shadowy royal courts must not weaken or morph into a crazy belief that the dead were living parallel lives alongside human beings who were still breathing. The two kings sitting comfortably opposite him smiled, Edward I sternly and George II with the insincere smile of a double-dealing German villain in a British war movie.

  In a rage of acute frustration, Charlie suddenly stood up and kicked the spindly chair to the floor. The clatter reverberated around the question room as if it were an empty tomb. The two kings were mulling over some modern papers. And yet they looked as perplexed as Charlie felt. What could Charlie do to turn the page of this detestable parallel world to get his children back and for them all to escape the sinister confines of Westminster Abbey? The two kings still said nothing.

  Thus it came to Charlie that these king jailers must want his help or cooperation in exchange for returning his children to him—but cooperation for what?

  Charlie smelled chlorine. A little man in a worker’s overall and wearing a cloth cap over straggly wispy hair came in. He was carrying a bucket and mop and floor cleaning liquid with a pungent aroma that Charlie knew was Dettol, his sister-in-law’s favourite.

  The little man wiped the desk with a clean cloth, unnecessarily Charlie thought. The little man nudged Charlie as he wiped the desktop and said in antique-sounding French, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,” also unnecessary Charlie thought since the nudge was slight. As the little fellow left through a door that Charlie had not even noticed, he turned around, inclined his head slightly and said in guttural English, “I beg your pardon.” With that, he disappeared just as mysteriously as he had entered and, equally mysteriously, so had the door.

  “Funny that,” thought Charlie, "he reminds me of line drawings of Geoffrey Chaucer. And he’s very like the man on the boat trip yesterday who hailed Shakespeare’s Globe. Then the connection hit him: Pardon and Chaucer. Charlie had to think hard and fast. His two jailer kings were now speaking irritably to one another in a mix of languages Charlie could not understand.

  By a hairsbreadth of instinct, Charlie guessed that the kindly cleaner had been trying to give him a covert clue with the word pardon. Of all the merry and tragic stories Geoffrey Chaucer had spun in his Canterbury Tales, none was more insidious than that of the wily and unscrupulous Pardoner, his flaxen-haired and bisexual—or was it impotent?—character. This charmless fictitious man sold indulgences to sinners who feared adverse consequences in the next world for their bad actions in this one. They wanted to buy themselves out of harmful consequences in the hereafter. The Pardoner also sold supposed relics of saints that were really common pig bones.

  Charlie had to think about what he had that the malign kings did not—something that they wanted so much. This could not be something material. It must be something abstract. Charlie’s next thought was that what he had was experience in the contemporary western world with its democratic and capitalist processes, always complex and often contradictory. In the so-called ‘first world’ of western self-styled democracies, every man and woman was entitled to vote for members elected to assemblies or parliaments. And there, no matter how great the apparent authority of a president or prime minister, people who were not natural friends would have to talk, debate, discuss and, in the end, compromise over policies and actions for the political system to work. Parliament—that was it!

  The spirit kings of England who had taken Charlie prisoner had in their lives to deal with some sort of parliament. Yet they still expected to rule. Charlie had been to enough office meetings stateside to know that workers who sat around a glass table might slaver over their boss and call him by his first name when he was in front of them as if they were all equal. But it was a different story behind his back.

  These Westminster kings almost certainly had had comparable experiences in their own reigns. But their subjects’ slavering over them and all the domestic cosseting they enjoyed in their courts and expected as a right sapped their ability to recognise dissent clearly and deal with it effectively. That was among the reasons why the very different English, French, Russian and Iranian revolutions had so surprised their monarchs.

  What hit Charlie hard was that the kings had double-crossed him twice. Theirs was a calculated strategy to turn his psychological insides into jello so that he would do exactly what they wanted him to do. They had enticed him into the abbey and then separated him from his kids. Next, they had turned him out of doors where he was going to fret uncontrollably. And when he had got back into Westminster Abbey, they had expressed mock outrage when he and Ginny and Georgie were reunited. The kings’ separating father and kids a second time was another effective turn of the screw to ratchet up his tension unbearably. How Charlie had come to detest these trumpery kings. No matter how upset he was, he was not going to give in—whatever show he might have to make of being contrite. He would do what the most sly of these slimy kings would do: wait, watch, bide his time, think hard and strike when his strike would be most telling.

  Charlie reasoned that the royal sense of entitlement and the fact that the kings’ officials had always reported upwards with insufficient willingness to speak Truth to Power—all this must have been especially true for English monarchs. And it was probably still true for these spirit kings in Westminster Abbey. Charlie also suspected that, as with office meetings stateside, the various kings and queens in the abbey did not necessarily like or respect one another. Therefore, they could be separated, divided and outfoxed.

  On some inexplicable instinct that he himself did not even understand, Charlie took off the plain wedding ring from his first marriage to Ginny’s mother, Genna, and spun it on the table. He knew this excited the two kings even though it was no more than a simple gold band.

  “Yes, it’s just a simple circle, not worth very much,” he said aloud. “When I saw the crown jewels yesterday in the Tower of London, I thought how grand they were, how much better they would fit their original owners rather than being left there on a moving ledge for us plebs and peasants to gawp over. When we came here—my kids and I—to Westminster Abbey—one of the guides explained that the abbey has copies of the crown jewels here in its safes and vaults.”

  “How do you know this? How can we believe you?” said Edward l somewhat greedily. His lisp took Charlie by surprise.

  “You don’t need to take my word for it,” said Charlie calmly. “Here you can come and go as you please. Go and look for yourselves in your secret treasuries. If I’m right, you can take the crown jewels and move them from the modern world into your parallel world. Since you move through space and time, no one will find them or suspect you.”

  Charlie hoped he would see and be able to follow the kings themselves move through space and time. Were there clear entrances and exits—clear to the kings anyway—perhaps caused by slashes in the impregnable plastic film material that had earlier held him prisoner in the outsize cone?

  “We’ll look and be back,” said Edward I. He crooked his finger to beckon Geoffrey Chaucer to follow him. And with that, Edward I was gone. He simply vanished, leaving George II to guard Charlie. Immediately, Charlie sensed that his new prison cell (for that was what this L-shaped room really was) had become smaller.
Again, Charlie had the unpleasant feeling that it had become more like the inside of another cone, narrower at the top with outsize hands up there moving things around.

  George II started munching an outsize Cumberland sausage that he pulled out of a side pocket in his coat. He was savouring its polished outer casing and its unhealthy mix of meat and bread and grease inside.

  “You know,” he said, swinging the sausage as he chewed away, “I don’t think I should like America.”

  “You don’t say,” Charlie began cheekily. “I suppose that’s because we have no ruins and no curiosities,” he continued just as audaciously with his pre-arranged provocation.

  George II was more than ready for Charlie and turned his vocal putdowns into back-handed compliments.

  “No ruins? You have your fast food. No curiosities? You have your cocktails.”

  The king waved his sausage to and fro like an orchestra conductor’s baton as he rhapsodised whimsically about American cocktails:

  "The 1920 Cocktail? Bloody Maries? Screwdrivers? Gimlets?

  Who’d care to be a bee and sip

  Sweet honey from a flower’s lip

  When he might be a fly and sail

  Head first into a good cocktail?

  “Manhattans? Bronxes? Golden Fizzes? Sex on the Beaches?”

  “I’d love a John Collins mixed so strong as to make your hair curl,” George II concluded as he took off his powdered wig and scraped his scrawny pate underneath—even less lovely as he scratched away. Then he said, sharply, “Speaking of American bars, you should know better than me the old barroom expression, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’.”

  Charlie was mightily impressed with George II’s surprisingly comprehensive knowledge of American cocktails. He was even more impressed that George II knew the ‘no free lunch’ expression dating from before American Prohibition of alcohol when bar food was free but bar drinks would be salty and thirst inducing. The more you ate the more you needed to drink—and pay for it. Charlie certainly understood how the expression applied to his present predicament.

  But how on earth did George II know the phrase and how to use it to twist the knife? It was almost as if he were a seasoned Manhattan bar-hopper. How could that be?

  As if to answer Charlie’s unspoken question, all of a sudden, George II used a remote control to switch on a TV monitor. There was a news program with a segment about a French circus visiting London. George II abruptly switched off the TV.

  ****

  With Geoffrey Chaucer in tow, Edward I got to the principal treasury safes and vaults of the abbey easily enough. But if the king had expected to come across a show of royal regalia, all laid out in perfect order for his delectation, he was going to be disappointed. He was outraged to realise as he searched hither and thither that there were no crown jewels there—not even trumpery fakes. The nearest things to any regal regalia were some clerical vestments hanging up on hooks and some modest clerical regalia, including an ornamental stole and a priest’s staff on a table.

  So exasperated was Edward I that, like a jealous husband searching for his maybe errant wife’s supposed lover, he even opened a tiny drawer in a dull desk. The drawer held nothing more than a notepad and some spare keys. Edward was incandescent. When there was nothing immediately before his eyes, Edward I started to ransack cupboards, throwing discarded things this way and that.

  “What a mess,” observed little Geoffrey Chaucer under his breath. The king did not hear him for he was still furious at Charlie for leading him on a wild goose chase. To make it worse, this Charlie Chancer was no more than a mere mortal and a common one at that, a despised human being that smelled to the august royal nostrils of the rank decay of everyday mortality.

  But when he used his magic of being able to move through time and space, Edward I found something else. Something he had either forgotten about in his long sleep or perhaps had never really known in detail in his own time: money—modern currency—not old-style pounds, shillings and pence or half crowns and far less sixpences, farthings and three-penny bits. This new money looked so different from what it had been in the thirteenth century of Edward I.

  “I don’t like this new money,” Edward I said angrily, “especially the new pound coins. As you know, I don’t like change. Do you?”

  Geoffrey Chaucer was too amused by Edward I’s unwitting wordplay to give a considered reply. But Edward I was more au courant than Chaucer thought. He said severely, “If that joke about change was the best they could manage in Edinburgh, you can see how easy it was for me to become the Hammer of the Scots.”

  Nevertheless, modern denominations meant nothing to Edward I. All he knew was that there was a lot of it, lots of paper coloured differently and all with the portrait of one queen in ripe middle age.

  Then there was some money that Chaucer told him was made of plastic. On the reverse side, it had the portrait of a man who looked like a bulldog. Edward picked it up, smelled it and said contemptuously, “Tallow fat.”

  Edward I returned to Charlie in the L-shaped room still in a towering rage. He shook his head at George II. Then he cuffed Charlie across the cheek. His stone—or was it metal?—hand felt colder than Arctic death.

  Now George II took centre stage in a stage-managed temper tantrum like a German cod villain such as Goldfinger in the James Bond film.

  “So, again, tiresome little man, you think you can outwit us with an empty promise of more jewels, jewels that would make the glorious jewels of the Romanov tsars seem like the tawdry trinkets in one of your modern dollar-and-dime stores, etcetera, etcetera?”

  Charlie had hoped that a move from this L-shaped room to somewhere else might give him a window of opportunity to turn the new space to his advantage. He simply nodded dourly, wanting to take advantage of the tense situation between Edward I and his several-times-over grandson. Charlie thought the way the kings looked one another up and down was a perfect illustration of the old adage that there is no honour among thieves.

  Edward I moved his head forward from his shoulders so that to Charlie—whom the angry king had again pinned down on the spindly metal chair—it seemed his neck had got elongated like the expanding body of an abrasive snake. Charlie suspected there were no depths of torture to which the cursed Plantagenet dynasty would not stoop.

  George II said calmly to his distant ancestor, “We royals could use the hidden treasures you’ve just seen—modern gold—to escape and live on in the outside world. It’s not Eternal Death but Modern Life that is our passport to Freedom. And it’s modern money that can buy you anything, including immortal life. But you have to have plenty of it. Then we can get the hell out of here.”

  There was a gentle little cough from behind. Charlie knew it must be Geoffrey Chaucer again, the perpetual savourer of humanity through compassion.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the little man. “It’s just as you suspect. Today’s crown jewels are not in gem-encrusted ornaments or regalia—even less than in tangible money (whether coin or paper) than you might suppose. Well before the twentieth century, all forms of riches were getting converted into what is termed Capital. It now takes its physical forms in bank accounts and as debit and credit cards managed by the new merchant class of bankers, credit agencies and commodities traders—and so on.”

  Charlie noticed a complete lack of surprise about this from George II—something that seemed to have escaped Edward I, who simply asked, “How do we get our hands on it, Mr Chaucer?”

  “Through all those ledgers, these computer print-outs, the computers themselves and the enabling software via telephone and Internet connections, sir.”

  Edward I visibly blanched at this little catalogue of things he should have known something about. By George II’s evident lack of surprise, Charlie worked out that he knew at least some of this even if his older relative genuinely did not. Charlie also thought if the somewhat grey-coloured Edward I blanched any more, he would simply disappear. He wondered why Geoffrey Chauc
er was becoming his subtle, if undeclared, ally. Charlie knew he had better concentrate on how to turn the little master’s skill to his advantage rather than taking time to thank him for it.

  “How do we do it?” insisted Edward I again.

  At that, Mr Chaucer grew bolder.

  “You have here someone with expertise in these fields, sir. In New York, Mr Chancer is what they call a commodities trader. That means he has the financial know-how and the necessary computer skills.”

  Edward I, still just about visible, faced Charlie as if he, the hammer of the Scots, only had to imply that he could bring the hammer of his personality, plus the brute force of his churlish nobles, onto his victim. His expression implied that poor Charlie must do as he was going to be bid.

  Charlie got the message. It was to be his task to somehow dredge up the secrets of all-pervasive modern capital and hand over the banked monies and wealth of Westminster Abbey to free the kings for a renewed life of endless luxury outside that would be supported by global wealth.

  Again, Chaucer came to Charlie’s assistance.

  “Sir, that’s not the way to do it,” he said most politely to the two kings. “I hope you’re not even considering trying to persuade him by torture. Water boarding, the rack or any other form of torture really won’t help. All it will yield is yet another body to dispose of. And that will be the end of your route to an eternal future.” Again, he added, “Sir,” deferentially in case he had gone too far.

  Charlie smiled briefly and then looked straight-faced again.

  George II could also smile. Whatever Geoffrey Chaucer had just said, he now went back again to his World War II German persona and said as sweetly as chilling menace, “Mr Chancer, you will never get out of here alive or dead, unless you fulfil your implied promise of getting us today’s crown jewels.”