The Triple Goddess (24 page)

If James had any ideas about scaling the walls with fire ladders, this would put paid to them. Also of concern was that the Tower force’s younger crew was hurling spears with enough velocity to threaten any Beefeater who was incautious enough as to come within range.

The score was seven to nothing and things were looking bleak for the royalists. The would-be besiegers looked nervously at the King as Arbella crowed her Schadenfreude over the heads of the confounded, high-fived her Italian accomplice, and symbolically pinned a garter—her garter—on his doublet. F
ounded by King Edward the Third, t
he Order of the Garter
was the world’s most ancient order of chivalry, and it could only be bestowed by the Sovereign.

‘Zounds!’ exclaimed Jugs in dismay at the way things were going pear-shaped, and, ‘Gadzooks!’ As a former Boy Scout, he knew the importance of Being Prepared. But what was he to do? This was
lèse-majesté
on the grandest of scales. Thank goodness that his mother, who had gone on well past her sell-by date until he was close to his before relinquishing the throne, did nothing these days except watch soap operas and drink pink gins.

It was for this moment, he knew, that he had been bred and trained, and it had not come too soon. He had been kept in short trousers by his parents until he came of age, and made to wear his schoolboy cap, and carry the same wooden pencil-box with the sliding top and swivel compartment that he had used in Primary school in his old leather satchel with the steel crossbar, when he went to Grindham public school and thereafter was up at Hardicanute College, Cambridge.

Alerted to the state of emergency by the Tower Hamlets pigeon, the members of the royal household, courtiers, and other retainers were beginning to trickle in, and the Lord Chamberlain hastened to the King’s side.

‘There you all are at last!’ said Jugs, trying not to sound or look relieved.

The royal servants began erecting tents on the sward, and imported into them the impedimenta of the Mobile Court, and the various Green necessities and comforts of home that accompanied the monarch on his sojourns around the Kingdom. The filtration unit for his health-giving beverages was unpacked, and the recycling machine that continuously produced the vellum on which were transcribed HRH’s copious memoranda, so that they might be illuminated in green ink in the mobile scriptorium and preserved for placement in the royal archives.

For Jugs was a mighty dictator, and a great sentencer, keeping a dozen scribes employed in shifts.

The portable greenhouse contained the flowers and shrubs that he required about his person at all times, to gladden his heart and eye. Also in it were the most highly strung of the houseplants, which could not bear to be separated from their lord for even brief periods, nor he from them. If he did not speak to them every day they pined and wilted. In the vegetarium, a crack team of organic gardeners tended to a temperamental collection of tubers, legumes, and grains.

The King had a weak stomach and was very finicky about what he ate. He had no need of salt, weeping instead over his food as he thought of the cropping process. Sometimes, if he fancied that he recognized an asparagus spear, or the shape of a favourite turnip, he would be unable to finish the meal.

Today, the arrival of the Mobile Court coincided with the end of James’s seventy-two hour gustatory cycle, when it was necessary that he betake himself promptly, very promptly, to the lavatorium to produce the manure that was spread on his gardens—for the pedigreed plants would tolerate no other—and used to grow coprophagous mushrooms for the royal breakfast.

Once he was ensconced on the portable excremental dais covered with padded white kidskin, and provided with a double roll of recycled grass paper impregnated with aloe, the Lord Chamberlain bowed to the King and begged to know his further pleasure.

‘Hoo…aah. Have the u-u-uniforms brought to us, LC, in the travelling Throne Room. Give us ten minutes to ourselves and we’ll be with you. Make it fifteen. This is a more than usually, er, m-moving day.’

‘Very good, Your Majesty.’

Word and other matter was passed, and when the King was installed on his solid-seated lightweight throne in an open pavilion of green-striped silk, the head keeper of the Royal Zoological Gardens was admitted to his presence. He was leading a couple of milk-white palfreys, one on either side of him, and brought them before the King. Each beast had a long straight horn like that of a narwhal strapped to its forehead.

The keeper dropped onto one knee and, as he dug his elbows into the palfreys’ flanks, they followed suit by sinking onto one foreleg and bowing their heads. The King was a distant cousin of theirs, and they had been trained in royal etiquette as foals.

‘’Slid! you idiot,’ said Jugs to his Chamberlain. ‘Honestly, we daint neigh [don’t know], we said to bring the
uniforms
, not the unicorns: the new uniforms for the Yeoman Warders. We can’t continue with the siege until they’re wearing them, they stand out too much in all that red. Haven’t the seamstresses finished them yet? As if things weren’t bad enough already.’

Late as always the unicorns’ attendant virgin, Sabrina, entered the pavilion blotting her freshly applied Laura Mercier Baby Doll Lip Glacé with a cambric handkerchief, a monogrammed gift from Jugs, looking annoyed and wobbly in ten-inch heels rather than poised and demure.

When Virgin Sabrina encountered the keeper and his charges on their way out, and was whispered to that her attendance was not required, she scowled and turned and tottered rather than flounced back to her own tent. It was so like Jugs to call for her when she was in the middle of having her hair or nails done. There had been no time to have the toe separators put in, and the nail lacquer had smudged and dried unevenly so the basecoat would have to be removed and the process begun again.

It was all such a bore, especially since when the summons came Sabrina was already running late for a cut-and-colour from Errol Douglas on Motcomb Street; though she had now missed her appointment she would still have to pay for it out of her allowance, and it would be yonks before she could get in to see Errol again—none of the other stylists would do—unless there was a cancellation, and what was the chance of that?

Jugs, whose face had turned the colour of Sabrina’s pink lip gloss at seeing her, pulled himself together. ‘Lord Ch-Chamberlain,’ he said in exasperation, ‘shortly to be ex-Lord Chamberlain if you don’t buck up. Again we say, where are the uniforms?’

At last the Master of the Wardrobe arrived at the head of a group of servants in formation like pall-bearers, carrying poles on which rested oaken chests. Staggering under the weight they brought them forward, lowered them onto the turf and raised the lids. At the King’s command the Yeoman Warders fell in and advanced, stamped, and saluted, none too smartly.

But this was no time for drill, and Jugs, his composure somewhat restored by three hundred milligrams of toadflax that his chief physician had insisted that he wash down with a glass of beetroot juice, to reduce his blood pressure, curled a gracious hand in acknowledgement.

The Lord Chamberlain stood before the King and held open a parchment scroll for Jugs to read from.

‘“Oyez, oyez, oy.... Doh! Now hear this: Following our gloriously renewed entrecôte with our worthy and ancient adversary the French...” Entrecôte? That’s entirely the wrong word, being French, and getting rid of the Beefeaters in beefy name not person is the point of what we’re doing here. Beeves, henceforth, are out of season and off the menu. Who wrote this crap, anyway? Surely not. Well, the word we should have used is contretemps.

‘Dash it, no it isn’t. Memo to file: ensure that both those words—are they nouns?—are eliminated from the dictionaries. Disagreement, spat, or barney...no, they’re not weighty enough…never mind, now isn’t the time to be farting...whoops, was that we?, do excuse us, around with semantics.

‘Back to the crisis, what? Here goes. “Be it known that ye Beefeaters are no longer yclept Beefeaters. The word Beefeater is hereby proclaimed illegal. Those who offend by continuing to use it will be mulched and fed to the giant daisies. Hereafter ye will be called M-Marrow Splungers.”

‘Marrow Splungers? Who came up with that doozy of a name? Sounds like a toilet implement. Oh. Yes indeedy, Marrow S-Splungers it shall be. “From now on, let nobody use the words courgette or zucchini.” There. Advance for the last time, Yeoman Warders, and disrobe that we may proceed with the induction and get on with dealing with the bitch aloft.’

There was a pause as the men stripped down to their, none too clean, long underwear.

‘Now, pile the old uniforms for burning.’

The red and gold costumes, which dated from 1552 and were made to a design by Holbein, were removed from under the awning and put in a heap at a distance, sprinkled with methane hydrate and set alight; whereupon a hip-flask in one of the pockets exploded. The thick material blazed as the Splungers garbed themselves in their new dark green and cream-striped outfits.

Jugs fidgeted impatiently until they were ready. ‘Good. We will now administer the oath. Hold up your right hands—tush!, simpleton, try again. Oh God. The other one, the other one. Better. Do you solemnly and faithfully swear that ye will never blot the Royal Escutcheon or dishonour the name of
Cucurbita pepo
, the noble marrow? Dash it, we can’t hear you. Again, you pussies, louder. That’ll have to do. Some of our best friends are marrows, you know. Oi, not so fast, not so fast, you can’t go until we’ve signed the Charter. Rolls! Where’s Rolls?’

The Master of the Rolls approached, preceded by a pageboy with his portable desk hung like a street vendor’s tray on a leather strap round his neck, and the King rooted through a collection of quills. ‘Where’s our best pen, Rolls? No, not that goose today, not Ferdy—Rodney. One must not show favouritism or they sulk and the quills fall out before they’re ready.

‘Ah, there’s a Rodney. Writes better than all of ’em does dear Rodney, but mum’s the word, eh Rolls?, you neigh the form. No, the buttercup ink today, we think.’ Jugs dipped the point in a pot of yellow ink. ‘“Signed this day”...what
is
the date?—thank you Rolls—“da di da by our hand, Jacobus Tertius Rex”. Shake sand on it...not on me, old boy, on the parchment.

‘Where is the Great Seal…in the zoo?. I said, “In the zoo,” Rolls: now would be the moment for a spot of laughter. Oh never mind, it wasn’t that funny. Master of the Rolls, melt the wax and affix the Great Seal
of the Realm
. On the parchment, Rolls, not me! Judas H. Priest. Sorry, Archbishop. There we go.

‘Right, when it’s dry roll it up, send it to the scriptorium for illumination, and cause copies to be posted throughout the City. At last, job done. Phew.’

The King, emerging from his pavilion, was now free to refocus his attention on the enemy above, which had returned from the fifteen minute double espresso break stipulated by Union rules.

Heralding the recommencement of hostilities, owing to an excess of caffeine in the veins of the catapult crew, the boiling contents of a lead bucket landed on the grass to the rear of the besieging force. James winced as the green blades withered in agony, and gasped as the receptacle, falling short of the oil, conked a newly inducted Marrow Splunger.

The score was eight-zero, and things were looking grim for the royalists. It was high time for Jimbo to show the fibre of his being; of which, thanks to his diet, there was a-plenty.

Chapter Nineteen

A sizeable crowd of citizens had now formed behind the Beef...Marrow Splungers, well out of range of anything that might be brought to bear against them from the battlements. News crews were bringing in TV cameras, network choppers were hovering overhead, and the event would shortly be broadcast live to the world and possibly even beyond Dover.

Suddenly, HRH was struck with a ripsnorting idea. ‘“Cry ‘God for Jimmy! England and St George!”’, His Henrician Highness hollered, slapping his anointed shanks. ‘We do think that we have got it. By that other George, the Third, we have got it!’ And he gave thanks for the seaweed in his diet, which did such wonders in keeping his brain cells inventive. Though his very inbred sense of decorum then returned, along with his equine expression, he remained bubbling underneath, so smitten was he with his brainwave, his bonzer scheme.

In ringing tones, Jugs called for
The Fiddlers Three
.

This Fiddlers Three was very different from the successor to the mediaeval trio the King had called for when Arbella had accepted her post, which had originated in the employ of Old King Cole. Although out of respect for tradition it included three violinists dressed in antique costume, they were out of place and inaudible amongst the green-uniformed massed band that it now consisted of.

The musicians took quite a while to form up, to the jeers of those on the battlements; but when everyone was in place and the sun came out for another dekko at the assembly, despite the affront to his superbity he was impressed by the rank upon rank of gleaming brass, and decided to stay.

There were saxhorns and flügelhorns, and bugles and cornets. There were mellophones, trombones or sackbuts, and trumpets, and every generation of tuba, bombardon, euphonium and baritone, serpents, cimbassos, and sousaphones.
There were vuvuzelas, or stadium horns.
Only the French horns were missing: by royal decree they had been declared politically incorrect like everything else of Gaulish origin, and flattened into cymbals.