Midnight in Westminster Abbey

by Sean Dennis Cashman

  “Go on,” said Sir Walter. "You’re doing very nicely. Take heart. Whatever you think of the not-so merry monarch who’s not in the room, King Henry V, who is here, is on your side, despite the fact that’s he’s obliged to test you. He knows it’s unfair. Take heart.

  “If Westminster Abbey really is a mix of church, mausoleum and Madam Tussaud’s waxworks for the ages, then our experience walking around there is more than easy entertainment. It may be an unpalatable lesson in the foibles of kingship. The royals here want immortality via large memorials as gestures to atone for the way society treated them in their lives.”

  Thus prompted by Sir Walter, Ginny paused in order to think through her ideas more carefully:

  “The unspoken interaction between writers and readers of their books is most striking in whodunit crime novels when the book needs to read differently a second time when its readers already know the identity of who done it.”

  Sensing her thoughts, Sir Walter said, “But it’s also as true of history books where second, third and repeated readings will yield different emphases and nuances—not to mention shifting sympathies—for the characters within.”

  Further encouraged, Ginny wrote, “And from some novels and plays certain characters live outside their works, like Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio and the Nurse in William Shakespeare’s play.”

  Thinking hard back to her high school classes on literature, Ginny continued.

  “It’s also true of master thieves Fagin and the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Besides, the novel has Nancy, the working girl with a heart, and her sadistic bully boy lover Bill Sykes, and it’s even true of the one-dimensional character of the self-serving hen-pecked beadle, Mr Bumble. Once read, these characters enter our minds.”

  Again, Sir Walter prompted her:

  “In some novels, it is the whole cast rather than several leading parts, that fascinates first readers, then film goers. Take Planet of the Apes adapted from Monkey Planet where society is run by a theocratic elite of orang-utans, serviced by intelligentsia chimpanzees and brutally enforced by gorilla military.”

  Ginny racked her brains to try and remember other things her different teachers had told her in classes on history and literature. And so she concluded that what was true in novels and plays must also be true with larger-than-life persons in history of whom Ginny felt she had also sampled enough in one night to last a lifetime. She was glad she would not have to meet Henry VIII or Charles I.

  “You’re waiting, aren’t you?” Henry V said all of a sudden, as he looked up.

  “Waiting? Waiting for the answer?” Ginny replied.

  “Oh, no, that’s easy—like I said. Damn right. You’ve guessed the question and begun to analyse the answer. And you’re waiting for me to say, ‘I don’t think I should like America’.”

  “Well, are you going to say it?”

  “No, far from it,” Henry V answered almost casually. “I would love your great open spaces, the high energy of your teeming cities, your inexhaustible know-how with inventions and technology. And, more to the point, America would adore me: a genuine all-action hero who’s also an astute politician—the like of which they haven’t seen stateside since President Theodore Roosevelt and that was over a hundred years ago.”

  Seeing Ginny’s wonder, Henry V continued on his ecstatic vocal high.

  "And another thing: your TV, your press and your mass media would love every inch of me, my physical charms, my military and political prowess. They would pour such succulent praise over me that you could practically taste their words. Damn right.

  “Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Dwayne Johnson and any tired action stars of tinsel-town’s yesteryear movies can eat their hearts out. Unlike them, I’ve been there and done it. Been to hell and back in war and came through strengthened. Not just strengthened either but much glorified by our greatest playwright. Yes, I was the first king to issue battle orders in English but your Shakespeare—everyone’s Shakespeare—improved on my English no end. Damn right he did. Forget ‘California, here I come’. Get me stateside. After six months, I will be able to tell New Yorkers, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’.”

  For a moment, Ginny was carried away by Henry’s persuasive rhetoric. So intense was the passionate feeling he inspired in her that she would gladly have taken the spirit king back with her to the US and smuggled him through Kennedy Airport in a carpet bag. But common sense prevailed. She thought she would have a better life with her first idol, Sir Walter, who at least was a true time traveller and a bona fide American discoverer.

  Then Ginny came to: she knew she must snap out of this daydreaming. She had to get back to dad and Georgie and escape with them back to the safety of her aunt’s home in Camden and the reality of a foggy London fall. English damp had never seemed so inviting. It was almost as if it was beckoning to her.

  Looking up from her desk with a certain insolence at Henry V who was still trying to appear inscrutable, she said, “You may wish me and my family harm but you cannot do us harm because then you would extinguish your own light.”

  Ginny went on scribbling her answer, secure in the triumph of her defiance. Looking up directly into Henry V’s eyes, no longer as a star-struck teenager but more like an equal negotiator with a supreme bargaining chip of knowledge, she concluded with a flourish, “If you do not reunite us—my father, my brother and me—your light will be a little dimmer. Surely, you do not want us to be the last nails in your own coffins, do you?” she added sweetly. Then looking upwards, she said to thin air, “Thank you, Queen Katherine of Valois for all the hints and thank you, too, Mr Chaucer.”

  Although she wanted to, Ginny did not in the presence of Henry V dare thank Sir Walter, the horseman and sailor supreme who had gripped her imagination. Instead, turning again to Henry V, she said. “The reason you kings can torture my father most and my brother least is because dad is the most obsessed with you and Georgie is the least concerned—in Georgie’s case, not at all.”

  Ginny now knew that what Georgie saw in the Tudor queens were no more than skeletal images because the Tudor queens were no more than shadowy figures to him. What Ginny herself saw in the Plantagenet kings had been coloured by her romantic ideas of medieval chivalry based on pretty pictures and illustrations. Her better-read father, Charlie, saw the English royals as sharp-witted sharp-shooters just like his wheeler-dealer New York colleagues in finance because that was his natural environment.

  Thus, Ginny was left with a conundrum. Had the three Chancer family members simply conjured up the kings and queens in their own preferred images? Ginny recalled her dad telling her that modern UK royals seemed to serve some deep psychological need among English people beyond the sovereign’s political role as a constitutional monarch.

  “Your father is right,” said Sir Walter from the side lines. “One of England’s cynical politicians remarked that, after World War II, the English lost their pride but retained their conceit. And the Dynasty-type shenanigans of the younger royals gave a glitzy cover to the loss of empire. It was as if showbiz glitter can compensate people psychologically for the loss of anything more valuable.”

  Henry V had been following Ginny’s thoughts silently. Now he said what she knew he would say, “Damn right.”

  At that, Ginny rose to leave. But Henry was not finished with her. “Not so fast. The invisible but impregnable film that confines you in these hallucinatory cones still holds you fast.”

  Ginny decided to be more rebellious.

  “Well, I’m not going to say you’re nothing but a pack of cards but I am taking my leave. After all, your English Magna Carta implies there shouldn’t be any false imprisonment without trial, whatever Mr Slime would prefer. And, as you’ve already said, I’ve answered your questions.”

  She gave a mock half curtsey to Henry V—something that looked absurd from someone wearing modern designer jeans.

  And so, Ginny ran unheeding and blindly anywhere and burst through the film as if it we
re no more substantial than old Christmas wrapping. But she ran into some heavier voluminous folds of material that seemed to mix dark red and garish purple—the dim light made it difficult for her to distinguish what the colours were. She pushed what must be a swinging door within the folds of cloth and found herself in what must be the abbey cloisters. And there laid out before her was some sort of football game about to start.

  Georgie ran up to her and said breathlessly, “We’re going to play five-a-side football. You can be the referee.”

  Ginny had no time to draw breath or collect her thoughts or say anything to Georgie. He was in his own world of excitement. Ginny saw the grass in the cloisters as a tangled lawn dotted with daisies and dandelions fit for a summer festival of Merrie England.

  GAME ON

  The teams of ghostly youngsters for five-a-side football were as enthusiastic as their animal spectators. At one side stood the raggedy lion holding the ermine ball in his paws. Georgie told the teams that this might not have been the traditional way the English started a soccer game. But it was how special ball games began in the US when a celebrity such as the president threw the ball onto the pitch. And this was what the lion did. As he tossed the ball into the makeshift pitch, the three ermine at first split in mid-air as if they were flying monkeys. But they came back together as a tight ball just before they fell to earth at the feet of Edward III who kicked the football hesitantly.

  “They’re off,” roared the heraldic lion but in a friendly way, winking an eye at the smaller animals, some of whom were shielding their eyes with their paws or claws, as they started to shimmy and shake with joy.

  Ginny was now at the ready with a rusty whistle that a shy heraldic pomegranate had found lying forgotten somewhere and given her. When she thanked it, the pomegranate opened its mouth and chewed one of its own pips and blushed even redder than its customary ripeness.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that was possible,” Ginny said to herself. “But who knows what flora and fauna get up to at night when we humans are asleep.”

  Ginny knew from her father that spectator sports served several social needs, allowing people to sublimate their frustrations in adoration of a favoured team and, not least, being a substitute for angry quarrels and even war. Ginny recalled the horrors of the English and French fighting the Hundred Years’ War that she had recently observed from the side lines. The thought of that prolonged war made her feel faint again.

  As if it could read her wandering thoughts, the cherry-faced pomegranate again plucked one of its fleshy outer bubbles of fruit and offered it to her. Ginny did not know what to do. If she accepted the little gift, would she be condoning the pomegranate’s mindless self-cannibalism?

  “There must a word for that,” Ginny thought. But before she could deliberate further, cheeky young Richard Plantagenet said, “Wake up. We’ve just scored the first goal,” and promptly plucked the peck of fleshy pomegranate fruit and popped it into his mouth. At that, Ginny knew she had better concentrate on being a referee. She blew the rusty whistle. It sounded like a saxophone solo. It was a wheedling babbling noise unlike anything the boy kings had ever heard.

  Ginny wondered if, when the game was over, someone would call out that all had won and all must have prizes and then expect her to conjure up worthless trifles from the pockets of her jeans and present them to the players as royal titbits.

  The game whizzed past. The very air in the abbey cloisters seemed to breathe anew, stirred with the palpable surprise and exhilaration of human movement in the game where the night before there had been nothing but dry bones crushed by the torpor of gloomy tombs.

  The nimble limbs of the tender boy kings, exhilarated by the welcome winds of rejuvenation, glistened as they flexed and stretched their developing young muscles. The gleam of burgeoning adolescent bodies seemed to hold the promise of hope for the future. The tiny heads of the small heraldic animals flicked from side to side as tiny eyes darted this way and that at the sight of the whirring ball of ermine speeding backwards and forwards with every youthful kick.

  “I’ve got to hand it to the little critters,” Ginny thought about the ermine ball. “They’re real pros, suppressing every hint of pain inflicted by their carefree handlers.”

  Moreover, the animal goalkeepers’ paws (of the lion) and hooves (of the unicorn) already toughened and coarsened by battle also proved sure at handling the squirming furry ball.

  There was another shout from the absorbed audience for Edward III had just scored the second goal, lobbing the ermine football with a hefty kick after Richard II had passed it to him. This was a surprising, nifty achievement considering Richard II had boots with the longest pointed toes Ginny had ever seen.

  “A hit, a hit,” called out the stock eradiated of Henry V, thumping its weight on diminutive feet that Ginny had not noticed before: “A palpable hit!”

  At first, player king James VI held back since he was not a natural athlete on foot and liked to weigh everything up before taking action. But he did not want to be seen as inadequate either. He moved cautiously, scurrying rather than running, skittering as if playing on tiptoes: “Just like the way court musicians play,” James thought to himself.

  But seeing girl Anne of Denmark in the crowd looking expectantly at her boy husband, waiting for some miraculous feat as if James were King Arthur wooing Guinevere, James VI of Scotland knew he had better do something to warrant Anne’s adoring trust. He caught the eye of his alter ego, the adult James I of England standing in the crowd and willing him on. James VI looked hard and saw James I distinctly mouth the forbidden letter ‘F’ as a clue as to what he should do.

  Young James VI thought hard and fast. What F word would James I dare to use in mixed company? James VI thought it better not to go off at a tangent on wordplay since the adult James I really was capable of every coarse expression. The answer came to him in a flash. In the vocabulary of James I the F word was probably ‘foul’. Then the boy James VI saw the adult James I incline his head towards Richard II who was dribbling the ball as he ran towards him. James VI stuck out his leg. Richard II did not see him and tripped, leaving the ermine ball for James VI to strike.

  Everyone was so surprised by the foul that James VI had no difficulty in running forward and kicking the ball into the goal of the Plantagenet team’s net. It was like a sure bull’s eye shot by an accomplished archer. Whatever the other royals might think, Anne of Denmark was overjoyed at the sleight of foot by her toy boy husband. She whooped with ecstasy as she moved forward to embrace James VI. She clasped her frail little arms around his scrawny neck and planted a sugary kiss on his embarrassed cheek. Although James VI hid his reluctance most ably, he now knew the needle of fear as he wondered what else he would have to do with Anne to seal his diplomatic marriage.

  Then James VI got the second unpleasant jot of the day. Facing him with a scowl on her face was the little girl extra footie player. She had curly fair hair, a delicate face and frame and could be no more than six or seven years old. She seemed to move more like the summer wind than a mere mortal on nimble little legs that apparently could bend any which way. She wagged her index finger at him and said, “Mon pauvre garcon! Tu non sais la disgrace. Quel malheur!”

  She had not scolded him. By her more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger manner, her reproof was more cutting for being dressed up as something else. She had implied he had acted in a way unbefitting a king. He was being told off and no mistake. But it was not so much the French words and accent that drew James VI up sharp as her proprietorial manner. It was as if she—a chit of a girl of six or seven—could boss him—a boy king of eight or nine—about with as sharp a tongue as any of his detested uncles. Then James understood the situation: French accent, delicate features, sharp reproof—she had the style and hauteur of a proper little madam: she must be his own mother, Mary Stuart, as a child, not only queen of Scots but also, as Marie, dauphiness of France through marriage to the future Francois II of the French house of Valois.


  So, James VI reflected, Anne of Bohemia’s magic had turned all the sovereigns in Westminster Abbey who had begun reigns as children back into boys and girls. This included all those who had been titular rulers when they were children—male and female together. For James VI, it was absurd. His own mother was younger than he was. He had not been born when she was six or seven. And yet she was taking advantage of future motherhood to rule him. It was worse than a nightmare. He had assumed that a return to the past would liberate him from Scots disciplinarians without ever a thought of being careful what he wished for.

  First there was his damned child bride wife clinging to him like stranglehold ivy. And now his mother was there too. If his thoughts of childhood renewed were for a hoped-for honeymoon of lust for life, it was well and truly over. That old Scottish windbag John Knox had been right in his denunciation of the monstrous regimen of women. And the more of them that cropped up, the more like a monster regiment they truly seemed.

  Richard II was injured, no doubt about it. When he fell because of James VI’s foul, he had stumbled on a spare shard of glass in the scrubby lawn. It cut him with a cruel gash below the knee. Scurrying little animals tore two strips off his shirt to make a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and also to bandage the nasty wound. Richard II would be out for the rest of the game. Edward III summoned the spare, Henry III, to take his place in the second half of the football game.

  Ginny found she was surprisingly vocal over the cowardly injury James VI had done to the Plantagenet team. In the half-time injury scrum of players fussing over Richard II, when she cautioned James VI she said, “You cannot buy your happiness at the price of someone else, you know.”

  Little James VI shrugged his shoulders as a gesture of petulant defiance. After all, she was a commoner and a particularly common one at that while he was a royal with divine right. He wanted to stick his tongue out at her but he knew that would make him look as common as she was. However, James VI was brought sharp out of his infuriating reverie by the wider sense of outrage between both teams in the little football game. With insults hurled around, arms and fists held up in threat against one another, James saw he had caused an all-mighty stand-off.