Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (3 page)

    “Not this time,” he said. “This time you bleed. This time, I’ll give you something to remember me by.” Slowly, surgically, Gull drew his rapier-point across Triumff’s left cheek. Dark red blood welled up and ran.

    “Learn from this, you wastrel. Don’t cross me, and if you do, keep up your guard,” said Gull. “Though I hear it’s not the only thing you can’t keep up,” he added.

    Triumff frowned as the jibe percolated slowly through his drink-crippled comprehension. Then his eyes snapped open, frighteningly sober for the first time.

    “You can stuff that opprobrious tattle up your scabby hawsehole!” he exploded. His blade lashed out in a vicious blur that wrong-footed Gull entirely. The blow was instinctive, angry, and undirected by any conscious thought, and if it had been struck with the rapier blade rather than a vegetable peeler, Gull would have been on his way to his family mausoleum on the shores of Loch Larn. As it was, severed air fell away on either side of the small but razor-sharp implement. There was a brief impact, a sound like cabbage splitting, a yowl, and a spray of blood.

    Gull left the yard in a bounding, frantic stride, his portly Spanish second fluttering in his wake and squeaking, “Seńor! Seńor capitan!”

    Triumff slid to the flagstones, his back against the wall. He looked down at something that was cupped in his outstretched hand.

    “Gull? Gull, don’t go,” he called out, weakly. “You’ve left an ear behind.”

    The man in black stalked across to the sprawled drunk.

    “Agnew,” said Triumff, looking up blearily, “Gull forgot an ear.”

    “Really, sir.”

    Triumff nodded, and then put a hand to his bloody cheek.

    “You’d better call me a surgeon, Agnew,” he said.

    “I’d rather,” muttered the older man on reflection, “call you a silly arse, sir.”

At the very same moment that the Laird of Ben Phie was divorced from his left ear in Chitty Yard by means of a novelty potato peeler, the six days of solid rain came to an end. Spent clouds, wrung dry, slouched off grumpily towards Shoeburyness and the sea. A tearful sun, pale as a smoky candle, appeared over the Square Mile. The City’s mood swung.

    At Leadenhalle, the cheap was reconvened amid over-enthusiastic announcements of apres-deluge bargains. By the Gibbon Watergate, on the Embankment, the men of the Cisterns and Ducts Guild slouched back the hoods of their oilskins and exchanged knowing, professional nods that hid their relief. In the stable adjoining the Rouncey Mare, Boy Simon woke up and remembered his own name after only a few minutes’ concentration.

    The City shook itself dry. Casements creaked open in swollen wood frames. Damp boots were upturned on hearths. The residents of the ditch-quarters began to bail out their homes with a blithe London cheeriness that had been called “blitz spirit” ever since the airship raids of the Prussian Succession. The marshy reek of drowned vegetation that had permeated the City for a week began to be replaced by the reassuringly familiar odour of refuse. In Cambridge Circus, pedestrians skirted a beached sea-bass gasping out its last moments on the cobbles.

    Within an hour of the sea-change in the climate, one of the Billingsgate mongers sold a pint of shrimp, and there was considerable rejoicing. Within ninety minutes, a troop of the City Militia in Babcock Gardens began the onerous, though unusual, task of returning the barge Mariette Hartley to the river three hundred yards away. Several of the City’s bolder cats were seen for the first time in six days.

    Two minutes before St Dunstan’s clock tower struck eleven, one of the faithful finally sold a lace memento to a passer-by. The parson of St Dunstan’s began a short service of thanks, and his congregation struck up with the Old Seventy-Sixth (“Though the Fence is Sharp, My Lord hath Riches Waiting”). Across the street, the Sisters of the Justified Madonna, who had ceremonially disrobed, pressed most of themselves against the windows, and shouted out messages of congratulation and other heartwarming communiqués.

    St Dunstan’s flock hurried indoors on the advice of the parson, all except a lingering choirboy, who was later assured by most of the congregation that he was irrevocably destined to have his eyes put out in the Fierce Smithy of Hades.

    By noon, the sun had coaxed a mist of evaporation out of the Capital. Every inch of wood: every bridge-post, every newel, every beam, every door in the City groaned and sighed. From the villages and hamlets around the outskirts, it was possible to hear the complaints of the drying metropolis, faintly and distantly, like an elderly relative stumbling out of bed next door. A goat-herd in the Brent Woods, sheltering from the downpour under a broad oak, heard the faraway groaning, and cheered up, anticipating imminent relief from his misery.

    At Richmond, the terraces, beds, rows, lawns, mazes, arbours and quincunxes of the Royal Palace blinked away the dew and woke up. Ornamental ponds finally stopped being choppy, and their lily pads drifted to rest, becalmed. The gardeners oiled and unleashed the mower from its lair near the boathouses. The Beefeaters started to whistle as they took off their weatherproofs and cycled off on their patrols. Maids on the south terrace began to beat carpets with wicker paddles, and maids by the wash-house began to hang out a week’s worth of damp laundry. Boar and turkey, penned in an enclosure north of the Chase, noted the approach of the Assistant Under-Chef with heavy hearts, and jostled the weakest present to the front.

    On a gravel walk along the paddock, Cardinal Woolly of the United Church crunched maze-wards, with two pike-men and a small, obedient civilian in attendance. The cardinal’s robes were rich to the point of Papery. The civilian’s hose was all but out at the knees. Tugging at his ill-fitting ruff as he followed the cardinal, the civilian moistened the end of his lead-stick on his tongue and pulled open his notebook. He was a nondescript, bearded man with tawny hair, long at the back and absent at the front. His ear was punctuated with a gold ring. His name was Beaver, and being me, your servant the writer, he will have no further words wasted upon him.

    “Know then, Master Beaver,” said his worship, “that the following declaration may be printed with my approval in your periodical.”

    “Right ho, Cardinal,” quoth I (Wllm Beaver).

    The cardinal continued.

    “Hereby, it is made known that her most Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth XXX, Mistress of All Britain, Empress of the Anglo-Espańol Unity, Defender of the Cantrips, Protector of the Jinx and so on. You know the form and style, Beaver.”

    “Ex Ex Ex, uh huh, right ho,” I said, nodding.

    “Hereby, it is made known that Her Majesty has no comment yet to make on the seriousness of the threat made to the Channel Bridge by the Liberté Gauloise subversives, nor on the unsound rumours reaching our ears from Wiltshire. However, on the matter of the Great Masque this weekend, it is announced that it will now go ahead, thanks to the change in weather. Further, on the subject of the Spanish insistence of an expedition, forthwith, to the new-found Continent, Her Majesty is still awaiting consultation with said Continent’s discoverer, Captain Sir Rupert Triumff.”

    “Tee-Arr-Eye-umff uh uh. Right ho. Go on, your holiness.”

    “Sir Rupert maintains that the Terra Australis is a diverting realm, but largely lacking in precious metals or other exploitable resources. Further, its people are said to be ignorant of the ways of ensorcelment. Given the grave hardship of a journey to the New South Lands, he considers further missions there unworthy of the cost and effort. In this, the Privy Council and the Church are yet to agree. There is much still to be reckoned out. And all, of course, depends upon Sir Rupert presenting his Letters of Pa Excuse me.”

    We paused, at the turn of the paddock walk, as a Great Dane the size of a pony shambled across our path, trailing its lead and carrying a rose trellis in its mouth, complete with climbing rose. The cardinal sent one of the pike-men after it. We could hear his calls of “Easy boy, easy boy!” disappearing down towards the lake.

    “Any official comment, your worship, on the rumour that Captain Gull of the Royal Huscarls is currently minus an ear?”

    “None whatsoever,” snapped the cardinal. “Ask him yourself.”

    “I did,” said Beaver.

    “What did he say?”

    “He didn’t appear to hear the question, sir,” I admitted.

    There was a splash from the direction of the lake. The hound retraced its steps across our path, dragging a chewed halberd instead of the trellis. The cardinal turned to the other pike-man. I closed my book with a shrug. The press conference was over.

    The emerald privet of the Inigo Maze stood before us. A blue kite sporting the Royal Crest scudded along above it, its line secured to some moving point amid the leafy walls. We heard the unmistakable sound of female sniggering. Woolly straightened his robes, cleared his throat, and headed for the entrance arch of the maze.

    “Your Majesty?” he called gently.

    I felt suddenly chilly, despite the sun. I rubbed my beard in a nervous gesture particular to myself, and beat a retreat towards the gatehouse on the City Road.

Some fourteen miles west of the Palace, the timbered Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park shook with the sound of tramping boots and yapping bow-hounds, those robust, lugubrious, liver-spotted retrievers from Abyssinia, noted for their reliability as hunting dogs, their extensive dewlaps, and their copious spittle. “Drooling like a fine bow” is a common expression across the Unity. Almost every physical aspect of a bow-hound seems to loll.

    A watercolour sky of the most dilute blue washed around the swollen sun. Fine mist, like cold smoke, rose from the soggy nettles and elderbushes, around about, and wafted through the forest of beech, mature oak and hawthorn. Distantly, fallow and roe, preternaturally sensing that something was up, scattered from deer-licks into the early afternoon.

    The Windsor Lodge had been built for the twenty-fourth Elizabeth as a gift from the Duke of Cartagena, one Gonzalo de Ruiz, a keen huntsman and keener suitor to the Royal Personage. Many at Court said it was the Lodge that had put the final nail in Gonzalo’s coffin. This was untrue. The final nail had been put in by one Ralph Logge, a joiner from Church End, but it was a safe bet that Logge had only got the job as a direct result of Gonzalo’s gift. Elizabeth XXIV was less than enthusiastic about the pastime of inserting iron-barbed darts into fleeing deer at very high velocity through holes not previously there. Poor Gonzalo, blinded by the double visors of love and ambition, failed to realise this, and would attend the Gloriana at Windsor regularly, wearing the latest chequered hunting-breeches, the most fashionable stalking-doublets, tweedy sporting hats with ear flaps, and bandoliers packed full of lures, calls, whistles, castanets and a comprehensive trousse de chasse that contained so many specialised blades it could have armed an entire company of Landsknechts and still have some bits spare to hang over the fireplace.

    Gonzalo would attempt to distract Her Majesty with discourses on the correct stringing of the composite bow, the training of the dog pack, the pros and cons of the frog-crotch barb, crossbows for pleasure and profit, detecting grot-worm in the stools of bow-hounds, and sundry other secrets of the huntsman’s art. Frequently, he would invite the Queen to join him for an afternoon in the Park. She always declined, having pressing business of national import to attend to in the Star Chamber. Elizabeth XXIV’s private diaries reveal that the “pressing business of national import” was almost always a game of tiddlywinks with members of the Privy Council. They also relate that she referred to Gonzalo as “that smelly maniac with the arrows”.

    Eventually, Gonzalo became desperate for some sign of progress in his suit, and forced things by making a gift of the hunting lodge to the Queen. He had it designed by the celebrated architect Morillo of Barcelona, who devised it to be “churrigueresque”. Technically speaking, this was a style characterised by twisted columns, broken and arched pediments, and pilasters with more than one capital. In practice, it was an overly enthusiastic wealth of decoration beneath which the actual structure of the building was largely hidden. Morillo assured Gonzalo that this was “the latest thing”.

    Elizabeth was certainly impressed by the gift. Within a week, she’d had Gonzalo beheaded on a charge of Conspiring To Mock The Royal Person. Elizabeth XXIV is reckoned to have been a mild and gentle queen, so the affair vividly demonstrates that there’s only so far you should push a monarch.

    On that misty St Dunstan’s Day afternoon, the men who emerged from the Lodge had thoughts of the hapless Gonzalo and his ill-advised churrigueresque very far from their minds. (Apart, obviously, from passing thoughts such as “If this is a broken and arched pedimental ornamentation, where’s the bloody door?” And “How the bastard do you get out of this benighted shed?”)