Mrs. Queen Takes the Train (39 page)

all, Katharine, break thy mind to me in broken

English; wilt thou have me?

Shirley interrupted, “I’ll think about it.”

The two women looked down across the tops of their reading glasses at one another and laughed gently.

Shirley spoke again. “Do you suppose they could make us a cup of tea in this place? What do the nurses do all night? They haven’t looked in for the last hour and a half.”

“Shall I go and see?” said Anne, slipping on her shoes and smoothing down her skirt. As she prepared to leave the room, she glanced briefly over at Shirley in her bed to see that she was stretching out her hand, calling her back.

“Anne, thank you.”

I
n the Royal Mews the main overhead lights had long ago been extinguished. There were only one or two night lights giving faint glimmers along the glazed Victorian tiles. Rebecca and Rajiv were lying in a nest of hay adjacent to Elizabeth’s stall. The horse was standing next to them. Rebecca was playing with a tame badger. Rajiv had been reading to her from the same passage of the play that Luke and William and Anne and Shirley had also been reading. But he’d set the play aside in the hay and was trying to get her to kiss him. “Oh, come on. We’ve done it before.”

“Just because I was feeling sorry for you. On the train.”

“You weren’t feeling sorry for me, baby, I could tell. I could read your lips.”

“Well not ‘sorry,’ then, but just sort of vaguely curious.”

“And not curious still?”

“Well, Rajiv, to be honest. I don’t think it’s a good idea. What would people make of us? I don’t think I’ve decided what I want. Or what we can possibly be. There are a couple of others I haven’t entirely said no to yet. Wouldn’t be fair to you to lead you on.”

Then, from memory, Rajiv recited some of Henry’s last lines to Katharine.

O Kate, nice customs curtsey to great kings. Dear

Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak

list of a country’s fashion: we are the makers of

manners, Kate.

Rajiv then leaned in and kissed Rebecca, with her shy assent. After a moment, he pulled away, nuzzled her nose, and whispered in her ear, “You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate.”

T
he Queen in her bedroom was feeling as if her nerves had been jangled by all that had happened that Tuesday. Waking up in a strange bed in Edinburgh, Shirley’s heart attack,
Henry V
, the defused bomb at Waterloo. It was too much. She wasn’t used to being without a programme for such long periods and improvising. But she had got through it. “I went right through it. Yes, I did. I went through it,” she said to herself, as if some reassurance were necessary. Her nerves felt overly stimulated and she knew that, though she was exhausted, she would not sleep unless she took some measures to relax and calm down. She suddenly recalled the traditional last pose of her yoga practice,
savasana
, in which, at the end of all the hard work and stretching and holding difficult positions, she lay covered up on the floor, breathing deeply, listening to her breath, but purposely not allowing her mind to wander onto any discordant thoughts. She went and found Rebecca’s hoodie, which she had not yet returned to her, put it on, and, stepping out of her shoes, lay wrapped in the hoodie prone upon the floor on top of a yoga mat. She stretched out her arms and legs, closed her eyes, and lay for five minutes, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but breathing deeply.

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
.”