Mrs. Queen Takes the Train
Page 30
When she opened her eyes, she felt better. She said a brief word of thanks to her body for supporting her through the practice as she’d been instructed to do by her teacher. Then she pulled herself to her feet by gripping the side of a chair, changed into her nightgown, and walked deliberately over to the small laptop computer that was on her bedside table. She got into bed with the laptop computer on her knees and her copy of Henry V. Like the others, she was feeling unusually moved by the conclusion of the play. She found a vaguely remembered passage from Act V, where the French Queen hopes Henry’s former hatred of France will come to an end in his marriage to her daughter, Katharine. She notes how angry and poisonous his former view of his French antagonists had been, then adds, “The venom of such looks, we fairly hope, have lost their quality, and that this day shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.”
Yes, that was the passage The Queen had remembered. She knew that the terrorist scare would once again arouse ethnic distrust and suspicion. She thought it was her role to help alleviate tensions among the different populations in the realm. She wasn’t going to wait for official advice on that. She made a mental note to ask Sir Robin whether he couldn’t write a speech for her, using those lines, as a way of asking for mutual understanding. She thought she might just send him an e-mail about it. She’d made an advance in her understanding of e-mail after Rebecca’s tutorial that evening. She now felt slightly more confident about how to receive as well as to send her own e-mail messages. Then it occurred to her that something else might substitute for asking the private secretary to write her a speech. She opened her Miss Twitter account, signed in as Little Bit, and clicked on the box where she could post a message. She was still new at all this and was following only one or two other Twitterers, including Number 10, the Household Cavalry and The Race Horse magazine. She herself had only a very few followers. Reading her Tweets there were only Edward and Sophie Wessex, Major Thomason, William de Morgan, and Rebecca Rinaldi, as well as a computer robot selling an instant business card service. No matter, she thought to herself. With two fingers she slowly typed in from Shakespeare the three lines of the French Queen’s that had pleased her so much. Then she looked at the message box and found she still had ten characters out of her permitted 140 to fill in if she wished. What should she add? She decided to keep it simple. “Namaste” she wrote, recalling her yoga instructor’s words at the end of the practice. “Let the light within me salute the light that is within you. Namaste.” She then looked at her message with satisfaction, moved the cursor over the button marked Tweet, and pressed “ENTER.”
About the Author
WILLIAM KUHN is a biographer and historian, and the author, most recently, of Reading Jackie, a look at the personality of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through the books she chose to edit at Viking and Doubleday. He has written three previous books: Democratic Royalism; Henry and Mary Ponsonby, a double biography of two key people at the court of Queen Victoria; and The Politics of Pleasure, a life of Britain’s most royalist prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. This is his first novel.
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Also by William Kuhn
Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy, 1861–1914
Henry & Mary Ponsonby: Life at the Court of Queen Victoria
The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli
Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover illustration by Oliver Munday
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“My Favorite Things” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1959 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of Williamson Music, A Division of Rodgers & Hammerstein: An Imagem Company.
MRS QUEEN TAKES THE TRAIN. Copyright © 2012 by William Kuhn. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062208309
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-220828-6 (Hardcover)
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* And you, Hohenzollern? How are you my little Kaiser? Don’t mention the war, eh?