Mrs. Queen Takes the Train

by William Kuhn

  William had noticed Luke when he arrived, a young man in a worn but form-fitting wool suit, remarkable for his lack of confidence. He was polished enough with The Queen and her guests at luncheon, but there was something rather silent, even catatonic, about him in the moments when he thought he wasn’t being watched. He sometimes seemed to hold back, or to be slightly confused at a moment when one of the other equerries would have leapt forward, like a horse over a hedge, with a bit of whimsy, or some self-deprecating candor to put people at ease.

  William discovered Luke by accident one day when he came in to lay the table for a solo luncheon The Queen was going to have that December Monday in her sitting room. Luke was on his hands and knees under her desk, wool worsted stretched across his rump, as he struggled with the computer cords and a power strip. He thumped his head as he was scooting out from under the lower drawer. “Christ!” As he came up on his knees, rubbing his head, he noticed William by the door, appraising him.

  “Like the view from up there, then, William?” he said, still pained by the blow to his head.

  This was a double surprise to William. He hadn’t thought this equerry even knew his name. Nor had he ever been caught out in recent history looking so unguardedly at young Guardsmen. “Well, sir, have a care for those trousers. They weren’t cut for going on maneuvers.”

  “So kind of you to be looking out for my kit,” said Luke drily as he stamped one foot on the floor, and then the other, bringing himself upright. There was a pause while he looked rather fiercely at William, as if he might hit him.

  Then, awkwardly, he stuck out his hand. “Name’s Luke, by the way.”

  This was a minor breach of palace protocol. The Queen’s upper servants, the private secretaries and equerries and ladies-in-waiting, might call the staff by their Christian names, but they were seldom anything other than “sir” or “ma’am” in return. They might all be quietly on a first-name basis after long years of service together, but not so quickly as this, and there was seldom shaking of hands. Upper-class Englishmen had a horror of shaking hands. They abhorred it. It was one of those arcane rules with them. They only relaxed the rule for dealing with foreigners. It was completely arbitrary.

  “My very great pleasure,” said William, swallowing ironically where the “sir” should have gone. “Is information technology now part of the equerry’s job description?” he asked nodding at The Queen’s computer.

  “If butlers are also tailors, I don’t see why a soldier shouldn’t know how to make a flipping computer work.”

  “Hmm, yes. But does she use it?”

  “Well, she had it on this morning. It lost the Wi-Fi and locked up when I was showing her how to do MapQuest. I was down there powering it off to try to get it to connect again. I thought she might like a little online music during her lunch.”

  “Music? During her luncheon?” said William laughing. “You must be joking.”

  “Well, she might like a little Tony Bennett, now, mightn’t she? Or, let’s see, Noël Coward?”

  William looked at Luke skeptically.

  “Or Dusty Springfield? Eartha Kitt, now?”

  William rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

  Luke pushed the joke a little further: “Uh, Bronski Beat, then?”

  William replied a little archly, “You seem to know all about that music.”

  “Well, we had a bloke in Germany. A gay DJ. He did 1980s nights.”

  “And all you big brutes danced together, did you?”

  “Stood up against the bar drinking, mainly.”

  “Well, it was the bonding, I expect.” There was a pause while both of them looked out the window.

  “I do miss them occasionally.” It was the first serious thing either of them had said, and William’s antennae picked up the shift in tone. He’d just been told something relatively private by this young man and he thought it was as well to leave a respectful silence to acknowledge it.

  “I mean,” said Luke falteringly, half wincing at what he’d said, and half impelled forward by something he couldn’t quite spell out, “not so many chums around here.”

  In the midst of this, the door lock clicked. A page in red brocade, wearing eighteenth-century court shoes, put his head through the doorway, “Look sharp! Herself will be through in three minutes.” Having thoroughly interrupted their moment, he shut the door and disappeared.

  William approached a small round table with a starched white cloth. He began singing just under his breath, but audibly, a Bronski Beat anthem from the 1980s that had a lyric about Jonah in the belly of a whale, as he spread out the silver and plates he took from a sideboard.

  Shooting a glance at William as he left the room, Luke started humming in a falsetto another hit from the same band about a boy from a small town. His voice could still be heard outside the door as he disappeared down the corridor.

  Just then The Queen walked in the door on the opposite side of the room.

  “Your Majesty,” said William, quietly bowing from the neck as he caught The Queen’s eye.

  “Hello, William. What’s that?” she said, referring with a motion of her head to Luke singing “Tell me why,” which could still be heard faintly disappearing on the other side of the opposite doorway.

  “1980s disco music, Ma’am. I believe they played it on special nights in the Rhine Garrison for the Grenadier Guards.”

  “I see,” said The Queen, sitting down in front of her computer, and with an arthritic hand on the mouse she selected The-racehorse.com from her bookmarks.

  Later that same Monday afternoon Luke advanced down the corridor, still wearing the suit made for his grandfather at Huntsman. If The Queen noticed it was a bit threadbare at the cuffs, rather shiny in the seat, he could tell her it had been made for his grandfather, and she’d smile. He knew she would. She generally liked holding on to things that had worked well for previous generations. His own appointment as an equerry to Her Majesty belonged to the same category. He was only in his early thirties and had served, so far, in Britain, Germany, and Iraq, where he had been decorated for bravery in joint action with the Americans. Most of the ladies and gentlemen attached to the Royal Household were closer to The Queen’s age than to his. Queen Elizabeth, however—she was known as “The Queen Mother” outside the palace, but inside she was “Queen Elizabeth” to distinguish her from “The Queen”—had liked good-looking young men. So she always had a young equerry attached to her Household among the senior ladies and gentlemen.

  The Queen did not share all her mother’s tastes. She was less partial to champagne, the theatre, and bachelors than her mother had been. Nevertheless, The Queen liked keeping up traditions started by her mother, so she too would have a younger equerry appointed to her Household, usually for two or three years at a time. The equerry’s duties involved being an extra man at luncheon or the dinner table, entertaining her guests, as well as arranging some of the transport on The Queen’s days away from the palace. He also steered unschooled visitors through the ritual minefield of bows and curtseys necessary for first meetings with The Queen. It was not hard work. It was an acknowledgment of hard work elsewhere. Few people knew how much The Queen’s court was still a military court, and how many of the male duties in the Household were undertaken by officers whose more ordinary experience was of unglamorous, uncomfortable postings in remote corners where they had often served with distinction.

  Luke approached The Queen’s sitting room. It was a smallish room at the rear of the building with a view on to Buckingham Palace Gardens. The palace had miles of state rooms with painted ceilings and gilded furniture, but when she was on her own, The Queen preferred sitting in this ordinary room at the back, furnished only with a television, a comfy chair, a worn sofa, and a desk. There was also a computer, in which she took only an intermittent interest. The room was no more than a biggish-sized closet, really. Discovering The Quee
n’s pleasure in sitting alone in such an unqueenly setting was the first of Luke’s surprises when he’d started working at the palace. Now he was used to it, and he expected her to be equally unconcerned about the request he was about to make of her. Usually, on days when he didn’t travel with The Queen, or when there were no engagements in the evening, he was in the palace from about ten in the morning until six at night, but this afternoon, he’d received a pressing letter from Andy’s mother. He wanted a few hours at home in his flat to reply to it properly. As The Queen had just returned that Monday morning from her weekend in Windsor, and there was nothing official on her program until Tuesday, he didn’t expect her to object to his leaving a few hours early. She was easy about things like that.

  The door to her sitting room was closed. It always was. Doors were seldom left open in the palace, another of his early discoveries. He stopped in the corridor, listened briefly at the door to see whether he could hear her talking to anyone on the telephone. He wouldn’t interrupt if she were, but there was nothing, not even the sound of the television. He fully expected to find her reading briefing papers at the desk while the dogs slept on the carpet. He tapped gently with his knuckle and waited for her reply.

  Instead of The Queen’s voice what he heard was a strange noise from the dogs. It was not unusual for his knock to make the dogs bark, but then he would hear her shushing them. Now they did not bark. They whined. He knocked again, which prompted somewhat louder whining from the dogs, and an isolated howl. He opened the door a crack to see the door to the garden terrace ajar, a December shower wetting the rug and blowing the curtains into the room. He walked in and shut the door into the garden. She’d clearly been here and was gone. Stepped outside for a moment? Gone for a walk in this weather? If she had, she would have taken the dogs with her. Instead, they waddled back and forth between the door and the center of the room, as if they were children shocked at their abandonment.

  Luke went to the telephone, dialed the number of palace security and asked where The Queen had gone. “In her sitting room,” came the reply down the line. Luke was impatient with the palace’s old-fashioned communication system. The man clearly could not see that he was already telephoning from The Queen’s sitting room. “No, I’m in her sitting room, and she’s not here,” said Luke with grim determination.

  “Oh, probably out walking the dogs,” came the careless reply from security.

  “No,” said Luke, “the dogs are here.”

  “Wouldn’t worry. She won’t have gone far.” The man rang off.

  Luke was fairly familiar with The Queen’s routine, and her aversion to deviating from it in the smallest way. She wouldn’t be anywhere else in the palace at this hour. The open outer door left only one possibility: she must have stepped outside. His current job was a desk job, but he could still summon up some strength from years of doing very little in his spare time but working out in an army gym. He went back and reopened the door. Buckingham Palace Gardens was itself the size of a small London park, but he thought he could jog around the perimeter quickly enough to satisfy himself that if The Queen had gone out, and for some reason not come back in, she was all right and needed no assistance. He sprinted down the stairs on to the wet gravel and jogged first around the edge of the gardens, and then down several of the central paths in twenty minutes, sleet mixed with rain stinging his face. With a rising sense of panic, he found nothing.

  He came back inside, winded, wet, and breathing hard. He knew rationally that now was the time to raise the alarm, but he did not trust palace security. It was not only that they were often lazy and inattentive, that they’d ignored The Queen herself when she’d sounded a buzzer to summon help some years ago after a lunatic broke into her bedroom before breakfast. It was Luke himself. Since he’d been back from Iraq, he trusted people less, and men in uniform not at all. He also imagined that somehow the newspapers would find out if he told security, and when it was discovered that The Queen was out somewhere on the London streets by herself, unattended, Lear in a winter’s storm, the papers would say she’d lost her mind. Or, she’d be approached by strangers in some unspeakable way. And he was responsible. He went miserably to The Queen’s desk chair. He sat down and put his elbows on the desk. He had no idea what to do next.

  At that moment Luke heard the latch of an interior door and leapt from the chair, assuming that now, at last, The Queen was returning from God knows where. He felt relief, mingled with terror lest she catch him sitting in her chair. Instead, it was William, who sailed through the doorway, saying, “All right, young fellow, what have you done with her? Very odd for her not to be here at this hour.”

  “Gone.”

  “The Queen does not just get up and walk away. Tell me where she is. And don’t you look as if you’re in a state? Do you realize that’s an Aubusson carpet you’re dripping all over?”

  Luke just looked at him, terrified, wordless.

  The dogs looked back and forth at the two men, first at the one, then the other.

  Part II

  Swami Vivekananda

  When she’d turned eighty in 2006 The Queen had reluctantly decided to give up riding on horseback. The royal physician, whom she persisted in calling “the apothecary,” as if he were someone who merely dispensed pills from green vials, had begun hinting some years earlier that it was dangerous exercise “for we old-age pensioners, Ma’am.” He was quite as old as she was. Because he was familiar, she hated switching to some newer younger man. That didn’t mean she liked his advice. Riding on horseback was about the only exercise she took, and, besides walking the dogs, the only exercise she enjoyed. She hadn’t fallen off in recent history, she was proud to say, but she did feel a disabling stiffness in her hips that made walking difficult after an afternoon’s gentle amble on one of the horses at Windsor or Sandringham. This did leave rather a hole in her weekend afternoons, and she’d consulted Queen Victoria’s diaries to see what the alternatives might be. It turned out that in old age The Queen had a two-seat pony cart which she used for outings on the estates at Osborne and Balmoral. She asked the private secretary to see whether he couldn’t find out what had happened to it. By some miracle the wooden cart was found disassembled into fourteen pieces in an outbuilding next to the Glassalt Shiel, a small house the old Queen had built on Loch Muick in 1868.

  [© English Heritage Photo Library]

  The Queen remembered first reading about the Glassalt Shiel with a wry smile. It was considered something of a joke in royal history. Queen Victoria had built the house up on the loch, a few miles from the Castle at Balmoral, as a sort of “getaway,” but as the Scottish Castle itself had been built as a holiday escape from London, the Glassalt was actually a getaway from a getaway. One of the old Queen’s minor self-indulgences, it was felt. The Queen didn’t look at it that way anymore. She understood precisely what Queen Victoria had been feeling because she felt more and more that she wanted to get away herself. Although she was happier in Scotland than anywhere else, even there the Prime Minister made an annual visit, and he often brought unwelcome news or tendered disagreeable advice.

  She’d been looking forward to the new man coming to visit as he was the first one in a long time who actually behaved like a Scotsman, and she anticipated getting along better with him than with his recent predecessors. Of course, she already knew him from his previous posts in other departments, but as he was now in Number 10, she’d be seeing more of him. There was something dour, humorless, and unhappy about him that suited her present mood. He’d arrived at Balmoral with his wife for a weekend stay in early September. She’d detailed Lady Anne to take care of the wife. “Go and have a look around the cutting garden, perhaps.” The Prime Minister she’d take care of herself. She thought he might like to see her new, reassembled pony cart, and go for a trot up to the distillery. The distillery didn’t belong to her, but always welcomed a royal visit and didn’t mind shutting down to the public during a li
ttle informal call from her. She loved looking at the enormous brass vats and all the Victorian plumbing. The whiskey she cared about less. Wasn’t her drink really, but she’d accept a small tumbler to keep off the damp, and then off they could go back to the Castle. Shouldn’t take more than an hour there and back.

  She came down the tartan-covered steps to the portico to find the Prime Minister hanging about awkwardly in a tweed coat that looked as if he’d bought it especially for the occasion. A ghillie held the reins of the pony that was harnessed to the cart. A footman stood by with cushions and two rugs to put over their knees once they got in. The footman put in one cushion for her, and arranged the rug over her knees as the ghillie handed her the reins. The footman was about to put in the second cushion for the Prime Minister when he said, “No thank you. I won’t need that.”

  “I advise you to take it, Prime Minister. Roads can be a bit rough up here. Wouldn’t want you jostled.”

  The Prime Minister was already getting in and waving the footman away. “Oh no, Your Majesty, you see I have so much natural padding in that area that I won’t need it. My wife is always saying I must exercise more.”

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” The Queen clicked her tongue, and called to the pony, “Come on, Smoky!” The cart pulled away from the portico with an unusually hard jolt to the back of the Prime Minister’s neck. He hadn’t been expecting anything to happen so quickly.

  They rode down the long drive to the main gate surrounded by gloomy pines still dripping from that morning’s rain shower. The police had blocked off the road to the distillery so they’d meet no traffic, and The Queen turned the cart up that way, keeping the pony at a trot as the animal pulled uphill, but allowing him to walk at the top. As the cart went more slowly, the Prime Minister was suddenly more aware of the silence and birdsong, and having nothing in particular in the way of small talk to share with the cart’s driver, he decided to go straight to business. “Ma’am, there are one or two matters which I have to discuss with you.”