The Triple Goddess (18 page)

Taking her into his office afterwards, the Lord Chamberlain elucidated what his liege lord had in mind. The job was no sinecure. In addition to the tasks already cited, Arbella would be expected to attend many formal dinners, and to fulfil speaking engagements around the country promoting the King’s programs of Conservation, the use of Green building materials from ecologically self-sustainable sources,
Green power, the reversal of global warming, the reduction of greenhouse gases, the elimination of carbon footprints, recycling, the growth of organic foods, the elimination of chemicals in food, and a campaign advertising the colour green.

To which agenda had been added, so recently that the idea had only entered Jugs’ mind...one was going to say popped into his head, but it was a long and circuitous journey into his cerebral cortex...an hour before she arrived, a plan to grow vegetables in outer space. Mitigating the hard work that would be required of Arbella was that the position came with a Grace-and-Favour apartment at
His Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress
the Tower of London, in the White tower, which, built by William the Conqueror in 1078 AD
upon a Roman bastion, was the oldest of the towers. It was an immense quadrangular building pierced with Norman arches and windows; and corner turrets and modern casing designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

The residence, a penthouse triplex, boasted views of the river on one side and the Waterloo Barracks and moat on the other. It would be staffed by a full complement of domestic staff including butler, cook, footmen, maids, and a secretary. These were to be accommodated on the lower floors, from which the galleries of historical weaponry had been cleared and the exhibits put into storage elsewhere in the Tower.

To assist Arbella in making a decision—she h
ad been thinking in terms of a Knightsbridge flat close to Harrods and Harvey Nichols, but this offer she found intriguing—i
t had been arranged that she should be escorted there forthwith and shown around.

For one who was so protective of her privacy, and whose greatest phobia in life was that of intrusion into her personal domain, what better place could Arbella have wished for or choose to live in than the White tower, in the centre of the Inner Ward of the Tower of London? From childhood she had imagined a massive structure like this, a donjon or keep with towers, thick walls, drawbridge, portcullises, and surrounding moat. The building was ninety feet high with walls varying from fifteen feet thick at the base to eleven in the upper parts. Above the battlements rose four turrets, three of them square and one circular where the first Royal Observatory had been housed.

It was a more practical version of the Renaissance ivory tower of literature, from which, as the place’s exclusive reclusive tenant she might invisibly look down on the world; where no one could pry into her soul, read her thoughts and feelings, or demand or compel her to do anything that she did not want to.

The Caen stone exterior of the White tower had been sandblasted clean, the better to reflect its name. At Jugs’ order the bombards, which fired stone balls, and cannons on the roof had been removed and melted down, and the metal given to the royal artists for the peaceable purpose of turning into classically inspired creations for exhibition in His Majesty’s sculpture park.

This tasteful space occupied the site of the former Tate Modern Museum, which the King had commanded to be razed and the rubble and installation art dumped at sea. The Director and Curators had been
redeployed shoveling manure on one of King James’s organic establishments,
and the demon-infested location had been exorcized by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The apartment itself was a delight to behold. No expense had been spared in restoring the Tower to its original designation as a Royal Palace, and to erase its functional image as a top-security prison. The rooms were filled with light.

The fixtures and fittings were magnificent…if a little green in the colouring of the fabrics and window treatments and wall and trim interior matte and gloss and eggshell paintwork, which varied and vacillated from grass-green to apple-green to baize-green to bottle-green to viridian to Kelly-green to lime-green to lovat-green to loden-green to chartreuse-green to jade-green to emerald-green to eau-de-Nil to sea-green to holly-green to pea-green to avocado-green to ivy-green to olive-green to sage-green to racing-green to Lincoln-green to Kendal-green to Veronese-green to malachite-green to fluorescent-green to bile-green in hue and tint.

The walls were hung with a mixture of Old Masters on loan from the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate Britain Museum, interspersed with bucolic scenes painted by the monarch himself, in the same as the aforementioned shades of green from his palette, with brushes made from naturally shed animal fur that had been donated by its owners in return for medical benefits and a retirement plan.

There were Flemish tapestries on the walls, oriental rugs on the polished hardwood floors, and antique furniture throughout. The bed in the master bedroom suite, which was a replica of the Great Bed of Ware at the Victoria and Albert Museum, boasted a Vogue Flex Deluxe mattress, thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets, St Geneve eiderdown pillows, and Charlotte Thomas “Bespoke” handmade bed linen with twenty-two carat gold thread woven into the finest Merino wool fabric backed with silk jacquard.

Laid out on the counterpane was a silk chemise gown from the Satin collection by Argentovivo.

The refurbished and remodelled White tower was, naturally, a Green building.
Rainwater was collected from the roof and stored in cisterns. That for potable use was filtered, subjected to ultraviolet disinfection, and piped to the sinks. Another set of pipes took non-potable water to toilets that used only one pint per flush. The
new sanitary system recycled the sewage waste as
compost to fertilize the royal plants. Urine from waterless urinals was enzymatically purified and sterilized, mixed with “grey water” from sinks and baths and showers, and utilized for botanical irrigation.

Heat was provided by a combination of air-source heat pump and solar panels. And although the walls were so thick that the interior remained cool even in the hottest weather, there was a climatic conditioning system that ensured a perfect balance of temperature and humidity, less for the benefit of the occupant than of the botanical species that each room contained; but one did not look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when that horse was one’s sovereign.

Residence at the Tower came with a single condition, one so important that Arbella would have to sign a certificate of compliance. There was one room, in the Waterloo Barracks, that she must give her solemn pledge never to enter. As a precaution in case she should be overcome by Pandoran curiosity, the door would be locked and guarded twenty-four seven by Yeoman Warders, or Beefeaters. Any attempt on Arbella’s part to force or wheedle her way past them would come to the King’s ears.

This she had no reason to doubt, for the satellite dishes that effloresced from the sides of Jugs’ head looked as though they could pick up a mouse fart on Pluto.

Arbella called the Lord Chamberlain that afternoon and accepted the position; and King James, upon being informed, called for his pipe, his drum, and his Fiddlers Three, got off the lavender-padded seat of the throne, and danced a jig. So chuffed was he that he commanded a peal of bells to be rung in Westminster Abbey, and, moved to generosity, ordered that Arbella should be allowed to avail herself, instead of one of the palace carpool vehicles that were rechargeable at roadside stations where they were plugged into the rears of rotational teams of large farm animals: of t
he Gold State Coach for her transportation needs.

The coach, which had been built for King George the Third (nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more) required eight horses to pull it, had a silk-upholstered and -cushioned interior and was decorated with gold leaf and painted panels, cherubs, crowns, palm trees, lions’ heads, tritons, and dolphins.

At her palace investiture Arbella curtsied to the King, went to the desk behind which the Lord Chamberlain was standing, crossed the fingers on her left hand behind her back, and signed a parchment scroll contract and certificate of compliance with a quill pen—illegibly. A rebellious spirit was already rising within her. The Master of the Rolls added his signature as witness, and impressed the Great Seal of the Realm upon hot red sealing wax at the bottom.

Then Arbella lay face-down on the floor, and Jugs waved a sword made of willow recycled from a cricket bat over her head, narrowly missing hitting her for an easy run.

Chapter Twelve

Over the centuries in Blighty the bloodlines of royalty and horses had become
crossed into a genetic cat’s-cradle. Ever since Queen Victoria’s reign, when the families of every major ruler from London to Vladivostok were so closely related that brothers and sisters had the same parents-in-law, their intermarriages were so frequent that their chromosomes had given up trying to straighten themselves out, and decamped to the stables, where they found the situation just as confused.

The royal family was able to converse with horses as equals—to “walk with the animals, talk with the animals” as per the Leslie Bricusse song delivered by Doctor John Dolittle in the musical version of Hugh Lofting’s children’s books—and had interests in common with them. The royals did not so much laugh or guffaw as neigh and whinny, and their overbites were as pronounced as the Hapsburgs’ lower jaws were prognathous.

The problem of genetically ill-advised arranged royal marriages was compounded by frequent separations, divorces and remarriages. Princes’ mistresses gave birth with fecund regularity to illegitimate children who, by patronymic tradition, were surnamed with the prefix of “Fitz”, as in Fitzwilliam and Fitzherbert. The only part of society eschewed by the royals in their amorous liaisons were the commoners, with whom crossbreeding was unthinkable because it would incarnadine, or redden, the blueness of one’s blood.

King James, although the top aristocrat in the kingdom, was in reality the least thoroughbred of animals. Softening of the brain had resulted in his believing himself to be a centaur, with the head and shoulders of a man and the body and legs of a horse...or it might have been the other way around or a combination thereof. The Groom of the Chamber, when he curried His Majesty’s body hair, parted his mane down the centre and combed his long fringe forward and to the side.

Being as vegetably inclined in manner as he was vegetarian in diet, James used a bale of straw as a throne, and for his orb and sceptre a mangel-wurzel and an elm sapling. In the monarchical tradition he never shook hands—to do so would imply superiority over the equids whose hooves were not equal to the task. If he felt like a snack between meals, he would drop to all fours and eat alfalfa sprouts off the floor, or have a servant put on a nosebag of hay.

King James, as the incumbent squatter of the Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, Sandringham House, Palace of Holyroodhouse, and Balmoral Castle estates, was a decent sort of middle-aged horse. He had grown up amongst the beasts and forged bonds of friendship playing polo with them, while lower class children enjoyed kicking soccer balls. He was of medium intelligence and build, somewhere between the fetlocked working type of horse like the Clydesdale and the fleet Arab stallion.

In addition to castles and palaces, Jug Ears was also of course very at home in and around hay barns, box stalls or loose boxes, tack rooms, dressage rings, pastures, and paddocks; as well as, being something of an aesthete, the Royal Box at the theatre. He was a prolific stud, and took his on-the-job business seriously amongst women he was introduced to in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot Racecourse, at the Badminton Horse Trials, and at show-jumping events around the country.

James’s was not an easy job.
After the main political parties had been rocked by a sequence of scandals, and engulfed in a quagmire of corruption and mismanagement, the Palace had been reinvested with absolute authority, and, for the first time since the Civil War, the Sovereign was again
again Ruler-in-Fact of Merrie England, wielding unlimited and undisputed power over a cowed and submissive Barebones Parliament.

The Prime Minister and Leader of the Whig Party had begun the toppling of the nation’s political house of cards, by deciding to out himself as Gay. He then announced his intention to divorce his wife and marry the Lord Mayor of London, with whom he had been carrying on for years.

No sooner had this become public, than the Lord Mayor was revealed from leaked doctor’s records to be a transsexual transvestite Lady Mayoress; whereupon which the Prime Minister determined to have a sex change so that he could remain officially Gay; whereupon his wife trumped them both by announcing that she was a bisexual transgender male; whereupon her husband apologized to her and the Lord Mayor, cancelled his surgeon’s appointment, and proposed to both of them that they might set up as a gender-neutral
ménage à trois
in the Dominion of Canada, with a blessing by a minister sympathetic to the Canadian Civil Marriage Act.

This they agreed amongst themselves in principle, or for lack of it, to do, but were beaten to the punch by the
News of the World
after it hacked the PM’s mobile phone when he butt-dialled while late at night the troilists were drunkenly trying to clarify amongst themselves who was really what before they did anything rash.