by Trevor Veale
“Indeed,” Mary said, “the people had respect for one in those days.”
Arabella moved close enough for the two ladies to notice her. She felt their plummy aristocratic voices drawing her to them like an old, nostalgic melody.
‘Do I know you?” Agatha said. “Your face looks awfully familiar.”
“I’m Arabella Scott-Natterson. I write for the Bugle,” she said simply.
“Of course! I remember seeing you at many a glittering ball, sitting in some corner scribbling in your notebook. I used to think it was such a shame you couldn’t take a twirl on the dancefloor with some young buck.”
“Well, that was my job – writing about who was dancing with whom,” Arabella said. “I had to stay alert and objective. Dancing would have made me too giddy.”
“Oh, those balls, I can see them now!” Mary enthused. “The rustle of silk taffeta as some dashing dragoon whisked one around the room!”
“I always thought taffeta looked rather cheap,” Agatha remarked.
Mary looked abashed.
“What about the banquets!” she countered. “Remember those sumptuous feasts? Some of them went on for days. Oh, court life was such fun…”
She suddenly trailed off, and reached into her purse for a handkerchief. She dabbed it around her eyes. “But now those dear dead days are gone!” she wailed “The barbarians have taken over!”
Arabella was beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake in approaching these two. All she could remember about the banquets was that no one was allowed to touch the food before the king and queen arrived – and they were always hours late.
“You’re right about court life,” Agatha said reflectively. “The banquets and balls were quite wonderful – though trying to wake up the queen the next morning was decidedly daunting.”
“Not something to be undertaken lightly,” Mary concurred. “Her afternoon naps, too, were a minefield for the unwary!”
Arabella began to chuckle. She remembered hearing stories about the queen’s fearsome temper, and how she hated to be disturbed before she’d finished her nap. Beneath her amusement, she started to feel the stirrings of an instinct that nudged her like a bird trying to push open its cage door, hoping to be free.
“Do either of you ladies happen to know where the queen is these days?” she asked.
Oh yes,” Mary said. “My daughter’s a visiting physical therapist and she swears she saw Their Majesties and the two royal highnesses at some institution she goes to on West Gorm Road. What a terrible thing – to lock up the king and queen in a mental home!”
Agatha tugged at the chiffon scarf around her neck, as if it was constricting her, and threw it with emphasis on the bench between herself and Mary. “I could kill that Paul Slamil for what he did to our king and queen!” she said. “The man should be locked up himself!”
“Thank you for confirming the rumor I heard – there’s been a complete news blackout on the king and queen’s whereabouts,” Arabella said to Mary. “Do you know if Their Majesties are allowed visitors?”
“Well, my daughter said that apart from herself – and she only goes once a week – the only outsiders allowed are the doctor and the priest.”
Arabella thought briefly. The doctor would be a government appointee, but the priest would be answerable only to the archbishop.
“I think those of us who are loyal to Their Majesties should be allowed to send them a message of support,” she suggested.
The suggestion was enthusiastically taken up. “Yes, let’s ask the archbishop if he’ll let us pass a message on to them,” Agatha said.
“You know the archbishop is giving a speech to the Church party next week. One of us could go along to it and petition him,” Mary added.
At that moment the cage door swung open and the bird flew free, singing its heart out.
“Would you mind approaching the archbishop and asking him to grant me an audience?” Arabella asked. “I have an idea I think he would appreciate.”
Several ideas were swirling around inside her head. She’d been thinking about an article she had to write about the Church Party, ostensibly to reinforce the popular view that it consisted of a bunch of old clapped-out clergymen, church hens and bible-bashers, and to altogether slag off its faltering deputy leader. Yet this same deputy leader, Thomas Lesot, could be the catalyst to spring the royals from their imprisonment. They could then be spirited away to Bulimia, where they would be a focus for the anti-government resistance, and give the Church party a boost for its election campaign. It would also make a fabulous story. Her Trumpet Blast column, although expunged from the Bugle, appeared in several Bulimian newspapers, and she knew a story like this would sell for many moons.
After discussing with Mary some of the things her daughter could accomplish on her next visit to the mental home, Arabella waved goodbye and walked away, her mind filled with exciting possibilities.
Chapter 35
The Humiliation Continues
Godfrey woke up smelling the rank, funky odor of his new abode. It was a mixture of sweat, decay and rancid cooking fat, and it helped him remember where he was. It also choked him emotionally and he felt like crying. It was a great effort to hold back the tears. He was wracked with spasms of regret, not the least of which was his refusal to respond to Slamil’s offer of better living conditions for himself and his family in return for political cooperation. He had left it far too late, in spite of Letitia’s nagging, and when he finally asked the superintendent to pass on the message of agreement, the brusque reply told him that the Party had already found a suitable opposition candidate and his services were not required.
He rolled over and almost fell out of bed. It was so difficult sleeping on a single. He caught sight of his wife, sleeping on her back and snoring lightly with her mouth open. She was naked where the blanket had rolled off her and he started to feel aroused.
Dammit, he thought, here I am, deprived of my kingdom, deposed, humiliated and thrown into prison – and now I’m starting to get a boner!
He slid the blanket down and eased himself out of bed. Then he padded over to Letitia’s bed and rolled the blanket completely off her, as gently as he could. He began sniffing her body, starting with her neck. As he moved down her torso he fantasized invading her, starting with his nose in her pubic tuft. She woke up when he reached her navel, muttering: “What are you doing? Stop it this minute! Where’s my blanket, Godfrey?”
“Sorry,” he said.
“There’s no two ways about it – you’ll have to see a psychiatrist,” she said. “Your behavior’s getting more and more peculiar.”
“Nonsense! A shrink’s the last person I need to see,” he replied defensively.
Letitia got out of bed and found her robe. She grappled with the complexity of it, looking for the armholes which turned out to be inside out.
“Oh God, I wish one could ring for one’s maid!” she cried.
“What with, your hands? There are no bells here!” Godfrey said. He struggled with his own recalcitrant robe.
When they had succeeded in dressing themselves, they each toileted and went down to join the rest of the inmates for breakfast. By the time they entered the great gloomy hall, the others had mostly finished. Catheter was reading a well-thumbed Stephen King paperback at the table, a practice Godfrey abhorred but didn’t comment on. Instead he sat down and poured himself a coffee. He inhaled the steam rising from his cup, but it gave him no satisfaction. Coffee no longer smelled good. He suspected the coffee they were given here was made with acorns and chicory.
He inhaled again, and Letitia gave him a nudge.
“Godfrey, don’t keep smelling your coffee like that. What with that, er, other thing you did, it’s giving me the willies.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“And don’t keep saying sorry,” she snapped.
After breakfast Godfrey walked down to the workout room. He didn’t want to be involved in any of the group activities sch
eduled for that morning, such as yoga or flower arranging. He was looking forward to releasing his tension and bitterness on the weight machine. A male attendant offered to give him personal training, but he preferred to use his own routine. The attendant looked uneasily past Godfrey at a man standing in front of the universal gym. The man was big, with long, straggly white hair streaked with shocks of red.
He stood like an Easter Island statue contemplating the machines.
“This is Balthazar,” the attendant said. “He’ll be with us for a few days until we can get him on the Community Program.”
The Community Program was the process by which inmates of the Home were gradually being relocated, either to relatives, paid foster carers or (as a last resort) to a dilapidated group home in East City. Balthazar had proved impossible to billet so far, but the social workers continued to keep trying.
“Hail Caesar!” he said to Godfrey. Godfrey supposed the admiral’s uniform he was wearing (it being a First Thursday) was the reason for this bizarre greeting, but he felt strangely touched.
“Hello, my friend,” he replied. “Please don’t let me disturb you.”
Godfrey sat down at the leg press and started exercising. There was too much weight on the rack, but he didn’t stop to change it. After six or seven presses, he began seeing lights flashing behind his eyes and decided to take a rest.
“You’re not,” Balthazar suddenly said, and Godfrey realized the man was catching up with his own earlier remark. Balthazar was someone for whom time passed more slowly, like a traveler approaching the speed of light. His forehead was yellow and waxy. His prominent nose, standing proud on his face, waved in Godfrey’s direction. He grinned, his pale eyes alive and merry under shaggy gray eyebrows.
“What say we bust out of here and find ourselves a couple women?” he said. He raised his arms and flexed his biceps. The lumpy muscles jumped erratically under the sagging skin. “I’m in good enough shape to sort out a wench or two. What say you, Caesar?”
A young female attendant came up to them, collecting trash.
“Hot damn!” Balthazar said, leaning sideways to watch as the girl moved between the machines. “We don’t even have to go out – she’ll do!”
“She’s too young, my friend,” Godfrey said. “She’s hardly out of school.”
A long silence elapsed.
“She’ll grow out of it,” Balthazar said gravely. His collapsed lips drooped into an inverse smile.
Godfrey shrugged, suddenly feeling nostalgic.
“Time and tide waits for no man,” he said.
The young care assistant came closer and began to retrieve a towel left centimeters from Godfrey’s face. He closed his eyes and breathed in, nostrils flared, to catch her fragrance.
“I’m lucky to be alive,” Balthazar said to her. “Look at me.” He opened his shirt and showed her a smooth white scar on his stomach.
“How did you get that?” the girl asked.
Balthazar flexed his arms and made the gnarly biceps leap. The shadow of melancholy passed across his face, as if he were recalling sad times and lost loves.
The girl folded the towel and moved away.
“A Slobodian bullet,” Balthazar said at last.
Godfrey got up from the machine and went into the men’s room. “Well, I’m not going to yoga or flower arranging – or bloody group therapy!” he told himself, standing astride the urinal and leaning back to avoid the powerfully astringent fumes of the deodorant bar. “They can stick it up their anal retentives,” he added.
Balthazar shuffled in. “Are you coming along, Caesar?” he said. “I know a place where we can pick up women with big boobs.”
Godfrey shook his penis and zipped up.
“I’d love to,” he said dryly, “but I fear my wife will come looking for me.”
Godfrey went back upstairs and took a shower, putting his face directly under the spray. He smelled roses in the stream. The cascade overwhelmed him with its freshness and he felt he was a young prince again. The hint of roses led by association to a riverbank, maybe a lake, a fine house in the country. And there was a gathering of some kind, people he knew but couldn’t name. There were voices among the roses, by the river or lake, and the familiar house, a mansion tucked in the hills, was full of music. “He’s here,” he heard someone say. Someone else said:” And how long are you going to be in that bloody shower?”
He turned off the spigot, groped blindly for a towel and began rubbing himself vigorously. He emerged in the corridor damp and irritated, to find Catheter and Letitia waiting, towels and shampoo at the ready, to take their turn in the single shower which the whole corridor shared.
At the end of their first month of incarceration, Letitia begged Godfrey to submit to a haircut. He was adamant he would never let a barber touch his hair who hadn’t been royally appointed, considering it a degradation of his rank. Nevertheless, under the pressure of his wife’s relentless nagging, he found himself sitting in a chair in the lounge and permitting a towel to be draped around his shoulders. Fuming with impotent anger until his throat and face were red, he waited until the young girl care assistant who had been to hairdressing school was ready to begin.
“What kind of haircut would you like?” she asked.
“I don’t give a damn,” Godfrey said. “Take it all off, why don’t you?”
“All of it?”
“You heard – sheer me like a sheep!”
When he rose from the chair his buzzcut bullet head made him look like a convict. He squinted in the mirror the girl held up for him and nodded with grim approval. His point was made; he had endured his humiliation without flinching. He thanked the girl and ambled out, whistling tunelessly.
Godfrey wore no hat or cap to hide his shaved head. Letitia became increasingly concerned, noticing that, as well as his lack of interest in his appearance, he no longer ate with his customary relish; he was barely picking at his food. He would select an individual carrot or potato with his fork, bite into it and spend the rest of the meal chewing mechanically. With his other hand he dragged his teacup to his mouth and swallowed with equal unconcern.
“Have you gone off your food?” Letitia ventured to ask on one occasion.
“I don’t seem to have any appetite these days.” His voice was a sad groan.
As the weeks dragged on strange and surreal, Letitia felt her life was a series of instants, each following the other with no rhyme or reason to any of them. She had long taken comfort in contemplating the past and the glorious tradition of monarchy that brought the past into the present and promised to continue doing so for all time. But time was now disconnected to any tradition, glorious or otherwise, and she felt confused and violated, like the victim of a vicious mugging.
She hadn’t the remotest idea when they would be released – no one told her anything. The superintendent was evasive whenever she broached the subject, and Godfrey was becoming too apathetic to care. She was completely out of the loop, and it was driving her loopy.
Meanwhile life at the institution demanded a much greater degree of self-reliance. She hated having to dunk her own teabags as much as she hated having to dress herself without a maid, and she desperately missed her servants. Godfrey soon acquired the art of swishing his bag around in his cup, and seemed to find the process satisfying, which made her feel even more alone.
The only time she felt content was at night, after hearing the heavy iron gates slam shut for the last time and the tread of guards patrolling the corridor fading from earshot. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and felt free from cares. Then she would fall asleep and dream of nothing for several hours. Inevitably Godfrey’s snores would merge into her dreams. She would suddenly find herself menaced by his snarls and snorts, battling with his grunts. She slept through all the exterior night noises and on waking would lie in bed thinking of Calliper and how it looked in the early morning mist, its halls now ringing to the vulgar shouts and curses of its present occupants. She apprecia
ted more and more the memory of being woken by one of her ladies of the bedchamber with her morning tea. Now she was roused by the brisk knock of an attendant in a green uniform, who shouted if there was no reply.
She missed the sunlight that used to flood into her bedchamber in the morning like the blare of trumpets. Somehow it had filled her with a confidence to get up and face the day, which she now was barely able to do. The sun didn’t just illuminate, she realized. It made everything and everyone shine like gold. The sun conferred benevolence – something that couldn’t be bought, though it could be taken away. She and Godfrey had somehow allowed a gang of impudent bandits to take the glory from them, leaving them to exist like institutional patients, slopping about in their robes all day.
Chapter 36
The Plot Deepens
Arabella Scott-Natterson found herself at the center of a slow-moving pinwheel as the coordinator of the plot to free the king and queen. She quickly learned that most of the courtiers and royal advisers had slipped over the Bulimian border or had gone into hiding. Through Mary D’Armoire’s daughter she discovered that Bart, the handyman at the mental home, was a closet royalist and willing to help the plotters, as well as enlist other helpers at the home. This left only the problem of transport for the four adults to be smuggled over the Bulimian border. She contacted Lucinda Limehouse-Blewit, who readily agreed to make herself and two horses available. Unfortunately, neither Arabella nor any of the other helpers possessed a car. Not even Archbishop Lesot had his own car and was forced to ride the bus in the People’s Republic of Melloria.
When she wasn’t coordinating the Gorms escape plan, Arabella was trying to trace the woman who called herself Sharon. She placed several discrete ads in the Bugle asking Sharon to call her, but no message came. It was possible the woman no longer read the Bugle, had never read it or perhaps was illiterate. She could even have left the country. As frustrating as it was to Arabella, who was hoping to verify the woman’s claim to have borne King Godfrey’s love child, she kept the hope alive while she fulfilled her busy schedule of appointments, beginning with the inaugural Church Party rally.