by William Kuhn
If The Queen took no particular joy in her clothes, Shirley did. She adored the weights placed in the hems of her skirts so they’d hang properly and protect her from embarrassment on a windy day. She loved the lining of the coats, usually chosen in a contrasting but complementary color. A plum-colored jacket made of raw silk had a green-apple lining that no one ever saw but the dressmaker (who was proud of her craft), The Queen (who seldom noticed), and Shirley (who liked to hold the jacket’s tart interior up to the light).
Shirley was friendly with one of the senior butlers, William de Morgan, who would sometimes stop by her room as she was at the ironing board, steaming out a few creases. His method was to come in her ironing room smiling ear to ear, surprised, and happy to see her. Then he would point to something of interest outside the window. “That’s a thunder cloud if I’m not mistaken!” When she turned to look, he whipped the purple jacket off the ironing board and before she could even turn around to protest, he’d put it on and stood proudly before the mirror, imitating some of The Queen’s well-worn sayings. “Have you come far today?” “Good morning, Shirley.” “That will be all, William.”
“Give it here, William,” Shirley said, noticing how much more proudly William wore it than The Queen did. It made him taller, more erect. He glowed in it. The Queen always put on her jacket with something of a repressed sigh, an elderly knight putting on his armor. But for William the jacket was a shaft of sunlit magnificence.
Unlike Shirley, William could not point to generations of royal service in his family. He’d grown up in a postindustrial town with no particular prospects or talents except a love of opulence and the daring to add a “de” to his name when he was in his twenties. He’d seen an exhibition of Victorian tiles by an artist of the same name. It sounded much more impressive than “Bill Morgan,” which he’d been called since he was a boy, so he went to the registry office and took it for his own. It was, after all, only a small change. He also worked hard. He’d worked for two other members of the royal family before he was taken on by The Queen. Before that he’d spent a decade working for a duke, then for a sheik, after having been a waiter at Brooks’s and sommelier at Wilton’s. He knew wine and food. He knew how to sense what someone might want in the instant before they knew it themselves. For him there was nothing humiliating or degrading about service. It was his religion. It was what he knew how to do well. He was proud of it. He left all these places with warmly satisfied employers who were sorry to see him go.
Working for the Royal Household didn’t pay as well as these other positions, but it had a prestige the other places hadn’t, and William was a connoisseur of prestige. He knew the difference between the daughter of a baron and the daughter of an earl. He knew how to address the envelope of a letter to each, a distinction that confused most people in modern Britain, when it didn’t actively annoy them. He could distinguish between a supermarket game bird and a pheasant that had been properly aged and hung. He could see at a glance whether a man’s suit was off the peg in a shop or made by a tailor.
The monarchy spurred his imagination in a way that used to be widespread in the late Middle Ages, but had now faded to a loyal few. The Queen coming into a room gave him an electric shock which he had to work hard to conceal. A photograph of Prince Harry changing his shirt in Afghanistan made his mouth dry. A view of the Royal Standard whipping in the wind above Windsor Castle caused his heart to race.
Much of this he did not share with Shirley. They both voted Labour. They were both devoted to their work, but if for William the monarchy was poetry, for Shirley it was prose. She put in long hours and was getting to the age where she noticed being on her feet more than she used to. If The Queen had a formal event in the evening that would require a change of clothes, Shirley found her chattier than in the mornings. Shirley would brush out her hair before The Queen dressed in an evening gown. She remembered very well when The Queen had first explained to her that she would be meeting a few people she didn’t know well in the evening and would Shirley mind reading out their Who’s Who entries so The Queen could ask in an informed way about their children or wives or parents. It was something Queen Victoria used to do, and The Queen liked to do it too.
If she were tired in the evenings, Shirley tried not to show it, as The Queen was more than twenty years older than she was, and she continued to keep up a brisk pace, or had until recently. In the last months or so, The Queen had seemed to slow down perceptibly, to be feeling not quite herself, to be a little more somber than was usual. Shirley noticed this, but it was one of the rules of her job that she would never bring it up unless The Queen brought it up herself. Shirley was quite certain that she never would, so she was surprised one evening as the autumn darkness extended that The Queen did bring it up. It was a Sunday in Windsor. Shirley would return with The Queen to Buckingham Palace on Monday after breakfast and stay in a room there, as The Queen had a busy week ahead starting on Tuesday and the other dressers were on holiday. The Queen sat in silence as Shirley brushed vigorously through her hair. After a few moments, The Queen asked Shirley whether she remembered “Miss Julie Andrews. Dame Julie Andrews, as she now is,” added The Queen.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I made her DBE a few years ago.”
“A good thing too. You don’t always give honors to those that deserve them.” Shirley sometimes used a little exaggeratedly rough talk with The Queen because she liked it, just as she liked rough strokes of the brush. They’d worked together long enough for Shirley to feel confident about speaking her mind on some subjects.
“Well, it’s the Government, of course. I don’t choose most of them myself.”
“The Order of the British Empire for David Beckham. What did that young man do to deserve it?”
“He’s a very good footballer, Shirley.”
“He may be, but I don’t think he deserves the OBE for kicking a ball about.”
The Queen changed the subject. “Julie Andrews, now. Do you remember that song of hers? From a film? I believe she played an excellent nanny.” The Queen’s voice grew warmer on the word “nanny.”
“Mary Poppins, Ma’am?”
“Not that one. The other one.”
“The Sound of Music?”
“That’s it! It was a song about her favorite things.” The Queen could still command a surprising soprano, and she sang out tentatively, “When the dog bites . . .”
Shirley replied in a voice that was closer to a throaty baritone, “When the bee stings.”
“When I’m feeling sad,” sang The Queen, her voice cracking slightly on “sad.”
“I simply remember my favorite things,” answered Shirley.
“And then I don’t feel so bad,” the two women ended in unison. They made eye contact and giggled lightly.
“And what are your favorite things, Mrs MacDonald?” continued The Queen after a pause.
Shirley was wary of replying to this. She was unmarried, having given her whole life to royal service, but the palace preserved the antique custom whereby the most senior members of the female staff were all called “Mrs.” It was an old-fashioned way of showing respect, even though it was very much out of step with the age of women’s liberation. The palace pretended not to know that the title “Ms” had even been invented. When The Queen called Shirley “Mrs MacDonald,” it was a kind of diminutive. It was affectionate. But she almost never asked for personal information, and to ask Shirley to name her favorite things was very unusual indeed. Shirley guessed that The Queen was looking for some way of speaking about what was bothering her. She also could list with confidence some of The Queen’s favorite things, so she decided to answer with something that might plausibly be on her list of favorite things, but which was certainly on The Queen’s list too.
“Well, Ma’am, I did enjoy working on Britannia.”
“Oh yes,” answered The Queen, as if an invisible bell had
just been rung. “Have you been to visit her?”
“No, Ma’am, I haven’t.”
“Moored at Leith, I believe.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“A pity.”
[Tim Graham/Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images]
Shirley thought it best not to reply to this. She’d seen the pictures of all the royal family on the verge of tears at the yacht’s decommissioning in 1997.
“Not a tear for Diana,” one of the tabloid newspapers had put in a rude caption beneath the photo, “but we all blubbed buckets for Britannia.” “To blub” was a verb Shirley had heard The Queen use before. It was one of those unusual words, not unlike her monogrammed drawers, that had an Old World feel to them.
“How do you suppose one gets there?”
This took Shirley by surprise. The Queen never in her recollection asked for directions. “Edinburgh, Ma’am?” said Shirley incredulously.
“No, no. Not Edinburgh. I know how to get there. I mean to Leith.”
“Well, there must be a bus, or a local train from the railway station, Edinburgh Waverley.”
“A bus. What number?” The Queen replied instantly. She was said to be a very rich woman, but The Queen, in Shirley’s experience, hated spending money. She always wanted her clothing repaired, or cut up for other uses, before she’d give in to the proposal that something new should be bought. She particularly hated spending money on new clothes. She insisted on wearing certain Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies outfits she’d worn since the 1970s, though they were several times repaired and beginning to show signs of their age. Shirley had successfully managed to confine The Queen’s wearing them to the days she wouldn’t be in the public eye.
Shirley replied, “I don’t know what number. Shall I inquire?”
“No, don’t do that,” said The Queen with some energy and shifted the subject to the weather. In three minutes, however, she returned to it. “And what is the fare nowadays on an Edinburgh bus?”
Shirley was so surprised that she hadn’t time to reply “I have no idea,” before The Queen rushed forward with “You see, some men from the Edinburgh Council are coming to the investiture on Thursday. I’ll need something to speak to them about.” And with that The Queen signaled an end to their chat by taking a dog biscuit out of her pocket and holding it in the air until it caused a small riot among the sleeping dogs, who all woke up and began yapping.
Several months earlier, at the very beginning of that autumn, The Queen had still been in Scotland, delaying her return to London as long as possible. A late Scottish September next to the river Dee can be unusually sunny and warm. The Queen liked to order a “picnic” luncheon at one of the outlying cottages on the Balmoral estate. These were often damp, uninhabited little places with long views of barren hillsides. Though uncomfortable, they had a kind of stark glamour. Some members of the Household regarded lunching there as a dubious treat. An equerry would go out early, taking bottles of spirits and wine. He would build a fire in order to warm the place up. If it were an unusually sunny day, he would move a table outdoors for luncheon. A butler would follow to lay the table and bring along wicker baskets of cold poached salmon and grouse pie. Ultimately, The Queen herself would turn up around one or half past one in the afternoon, with a lady-in-waiting, whatever private secretary was on duty, whoever happened to be staying in the Castle, and the occasional invited neighbor. They had a drink standing up in groups and then sat down at the table, six, or eight, or sometimes even ten.
“Oh, Anne, I’ve left behind my headscarf. Now it’s sure to start pouring down.”
Lady Anne Bevil was in the backseat of a black Range Rover with The Queen, bouncing along over a rutted road twenty minutes from Balmoral. The security man was sitting in front and the deputy private secretary was at the wheel. They were driving to a remote cottage. Anne was fuming. The Queen’s remark was no passing observation, but a command that when they got there Anne should get in the car and drive back to the house to fetch the missing headscarf.
“Ma’am, I’ll go get it. I have left behind my pills, and I must have them with me.”
“Oh, Anne, such trouble. But I’d be very grateful. Not a good time for either of us to be getting wet,” said The Queen, making a little joke about their age.
Lady Anne came from one of the country’s richest and most aristocratic families. Her ancestors on her father’s side had been made earls in the eighteenth century. They agreed to vote with Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons. Walpole had rewarded their loyalty not only with a peerage but several commissions to sell the army cotton breeches for soldiers. This quickly built their minor fortune into one of epic proportions. Under Queen Victoria the Bevils had been promoted in the peerage and become marquesses of Thyonville. The money on her mother’s side was newer but greater. A Canadian newspaper tycoon had acquired shares in several tabloid newspapers during the early twentieth century. Soon members of every government, of whatever political shade, accepted the tycoon’s invitations to dinner, and his daughter married a Bevil, eventually becoming Marchioness of Thyonville. Anne was born in 1936, the youngest child of the union between the Canadians and the Bevils. She was ten years younger than The Queen. Her eldest brother, who was due to inherit the family title, had once been talked of as a potential husband for The Queen. Instead, Lord Mountbatten had produced Philip of Greece for The Queen to marry before the Bevils and the rest of the aristocracy quite realized what was happening. So Philip married the woman who would one day be queen and, as it turned out, Anne’s elder brother had died young. The title had gone to his son, Anne’s nephew.
Anne herself had married a man who took her not inconsiderable dowry from the Thyonville estate and lost it in the City. Mortified by what he’d done with his wife’s money, he then died of a stroke. Anne found herself a widow in her forties. She had a son, with whom she was not on speaking terms, and a small pension left to her by her husband. She had a large flat in Chelsea on Tite Street, but that was hardly enough to keep her fed and clothed in her old age. She clung to the shreds of her former glory by giving up her married name and returning to her Bevil maiden name for both herself and her son. She also retained her courtesy title, “Lady Anne,” as the daughter of a marquess. She insisted on its being used more often than was common among other British women in her position in the first years of the second millennium.
She struggled on with the pension and some small investments left to her by the death of maiden aunts. The Queen sometimes chose for her ladies-in-waiting women from good families who were financially down on their luck. They usually welcomed the small stipend from the Royal Household and had manners suitable for making royal social life run smoothly. The job was really about being a companion to The Queen in her formal duties outside the palace: collecting bouquets from children, replying to letters on behalf of The Queen, making conversation with politicians in the twenty minutes before The Queen was ready for their audience with her.
It didn’t mean that Anne was particularly happy with routine chores, no matter how light. She drove back to the Castle and then returned to the cottage to find that drinks were already over. The party was about to sit down to some soggy fish as a first course for luncheon. Hardly the thing one wanted when one had been driving down poor roads and steering around large chunks of granite in—The Queen had been right about the weather—heavy rain.
Anne put The Queen’s headscarf quietly next to her handbag and made her way to the table, noting from a sheet of paper with the placement on a sideboard that she was sitting next to the young Guardsman who had just come on duty as equerry, Major Thomason.
To her surprise, she heard The Queen say, “Darling, thank you.” Anne and The Queen had known each other for years, and The Queen always thanked for the smallest of services, but this was the first time The Queen had ever uttered anything remotely affectionate to her. She began to murmur with embarr
assment that it was nothing when she noticed that The Queen had actually been speaking to a black Labrador that had put a bone into her hand. Anne saved herself from speaking just in time by turning “Think nothing of it, Ma’am” to “What a loyal dog, Ma’am.”
Anne made her way to her place at the table. She smiled at the deputy private secretary on her left, and then turned to introduce herself to the young man in a tweed coat on her right. “I don’t think we’ve met. Anne Bevil.” The equerry turned to her and first mouthed silently, “Darling, thank you.” She shut her eyes and permitted herself a little laughing shake of the shoulders. When she opened her eyes, he was smiling broadly at her and saying, “Luke Thomason.”
“You’re a very young man to be in such august surroundings,” said Lady Anne, glancing up at the damp spot streaming down the cottage wall and expertly flicking away a few bones from her salmon. How she wished for the boneless fillets you could have from Sainsbury’s rather than these skeletal fish gutted in haste by ghillies next to a peat fire.
Luke caught Lady Anne’s ironic feint in his direction and answered in kind. “Well, I was in Iraq, love, I expect that’s it.” Anne laughed delightedly. A young man who didn’t mind flirting with a woman his mother’s age—how rarely one ran across that.
“Iraq, now? That took some courage if I’m not mistaken.” She paused for a moment to allow him to see that she was partly making fun of him, but not entirely. “I don’t expect you’ll tell me about it. Your friends, perhaps, but not some strange woman at a sumptuous luncheon.”
He pretended not to have heard her properly. “Strange women at scrumptious lunches are okay by me,” he said, flashing a corner of a smile. He always expected to like people that were a bit older than him, something about the way he was put together, and he liked this lady-in-waiting. He’d heard of her, but as he was still newish, and she’d just arrived in Scotland to replace one of the other ladies, this was the first they’d met. He’d found the Household could be a chilly place. It was good to have friends, as the others on duty didn’t, in his experience, warm up very quickly. Prior to becoming The Queen’s equerry, Luke had been at a public school and trained for his commission at Sandhurst. As his father and grandfather had both been in the Grenadier Guards, the army as a career came naturally to him. He’d especially liked Germany. The officers’ barracks were nondescript 1960s bunkers, but the feeling was a good deal more matey than Sandhurst. There were fewer full-dress occasions. The men under his command were happy to have light work and regular pay, and for many of them it was a change just to have a reliable roof over their heads. They regarded it as somewhat better than jail.
