Royal Rumble - Crown and Love

THE EQUERRY

The war had given Edward Jacques a great many things: a Distinguished Flying Cross with a bar to it, a scar along the left side of his jaw where a splinter of Perspex had caught him during a forced landing in the summer of 1940, a habit of waking at the smallest sound, and a silence about himself that no amount of polite prompting at dinner tables ever quite managed to unpick. It had also, though this was a debt he owed to no enemy action but to his own wife, taken from him a marriage, and with it, in the particular arithmetic of a world still governed by old rules dressed in new coats, a portion of his good name.

He had married Cynthia Ashworth in the spring of 1938, when he was five-and-twenty and newly commissioned, and she was three-and-twenty and considered, by the standards of the county in which both their families held land, an excellent match: pretty in the fair, unremarkable way that photographed well in the local papers, accomplished at the piano, and possessed of a father whose acres marched alongside Edward's own family's for the better part of two miles. It had been, everyone agreed, a sensible arrangement as much as a romantic one, and Edward, who had never in his life been given to great flights of feeling, had thought himself entirely content with that.

Then came the war, and with it, three years in which he saw his wife perhaps six times in total, each visit shorter and stranger than the last, each goodbye at the railway station a little more perfunctory than the one before. He had told himself, flying his sorties out of a grass airfield in Kent through the long, murderous summer of 1940, that this was simply the shape war gave to marriages, that Cynthia's letters, growing thinner and less frequent as the months wore on, were only the natural consequence of a woman left too long alone with her own thoughts.

He had not known, until he came home on a fortnight's leave in the autumn of 1943, thinner than when he had left and with a fresh scar still pink along his jaw, that his wife had spent the better part of two years in the company of a Mr Gerald Fenwick, a man some years Edward's senior who had been excused active service on account of a weak chest, and who had apparently found ample opportunity, in Edward's long absence, to make himself indispensable to Cynthia in ways a husband abroad could not.

He had learnt of it not from his wife, who greeted him at the door that autumn evening with a composure he ought, in hindsight, to have found suspicious in itself, but from his own housekeeper, a Mrs Pettifer of some sixty years and considerable discretion, who took him aside in the scullery on his second morning home and told him, in a low voice and with her eyes fixed firmly upon the potatoes she was peeling, that she thought he ought to know certain things before he made himself any further a fool in the village.

The divorce that followed, obtained in 1944 on grounds that made unhappy reading in a decree absolute Edward had been obliged to collect in person from a solicitor's office in Chancery Lane, had been conducted with as much quiet as such things could be conducted, which was to say, not very much quiet at all. The county had talked, as counties will. The RAF, more discreetly but no less thoroughly, had talked also. A divorced officer was not, in the England of the middle 1940s, a ruined man, not quite, but he was a man about whom certain doors, certain rooms, certain invitations would always after be that fraction more difficult to obtain, and Edward, returning to operational flying within the month, had told himself he did not care, and had very nearly believed it.

There was, in all of this, one casualty he minded a great deal more than his own reputation, and that was his son.

Thomas had been born in the spring of 1945, some five months before the decree was made absolute, a fact which Edward, doing the sums quietly and alone in his quarters one evening, understood well enough without anyone troubling to explain it to him. He had gone to see the boy in hospital regardless, a squalling, red-faced infant with a shock of fair hair so like his mother's that there could be no mistaking the resemblance even had Edward wished to, and had found, to his own considerable surprise, that it made not the slightest difference to him whose child, by blood, the boy might prove to be. He held him once, awkwardly, in the front parlour of Cynthia's family home, and felt something turn over in his chest that he had not felt since before the war, and from that hour considered Thomas his son in every sense that mattered, whatever the county gossips might whisper about dates and decrees.

Custody, in the settlement that followed the divorce, had gone to Cynthia, as custody generally did in such cases, and Edward had been left with the more modest consolation of occasional visits, arranged through solicitors and conducted, more often than not, under the watchful and faintly hostile eye of Mrs Ashworth, Cynthia's mother, who had never forgiven Edward the scandal of the divorce regardless of whose conduct had precipitated it.

*

It was in the winter of 1951, some six years after the divorce and three since the war's proper end had settled into something like an ordinary peace, that Edward received the letter that would, in its quiet, official way, alter the whole remaining course of his life.

The late King, whose health had for some time been a matter of private concern within the Household though carefully guarded from public knowledge, required a new equerry, a younger man, preferably one with a distinguished service record, to assist in the daily round of ceremonial and practical duties that attended upon the Crown. Edward's name had been put forward by an old squadron commander now attached to the Household in some minor capacity, a man who had flown beside Edward over the Channel and who valued steadiness of character above the small matter of a decree absolute filed some years past.

Edward had gone up to the Palace for his interview on a grey morning in January, the sort of low, sodden London day when the fog sat close along the river and every lamp along the Mall burned yellow at eleven in the morning as though it were dusk. He had worn his best uniform, the buttons polished the night before by Mrs Pettifer with a thoroughness that suggested she understood, better than he perhaps did himself, quite how much rode upon the interview, and had been shown, after some three-quarters of an hour's waiting in an anteroom hung with portraits of long-dead courtiers, into a private study where the King himself, thinner and greyer than his photographs suggested but with a directness of manner that put Edward almost at ease, asked him a series of brief, practical questions about his service record, his family, and, with a bluntness Edward had not expected, his divorce.

"I understand there was some difficulty," the King had said, not unkindly, turning a paper-knife over in his fingers as he spoke.

"There was, sir. The fault was not mine, though I shan't pretend the divorce itself hasn't followed me regardless."

"It generally does," the King had said, with something that might almost have been sympathy. "I shan't hold a man's misfortune against his usefulness, Group Captain. We shall see how you do."

He had been given the appointment within the week, and had spent the better part of the following two years in the quiet, exacting business of equerrying: arranging the King's engagements, riding beside the royal carriage on state occasions, standing for hours at a time in cold anterooms and colder cathedrals with the particular stillness the role demanded, a stillness Edward, after six years of flying and six more of a marriage's slow collapse, found he had a natural talent for.

The King's death, when it came in the early months of 1953, was not unexpected within the Household, however great a shock it proved to the wider public, and Edward, along with the greater part of the late King's staff, found his appointment quietly transferred to the household of the new Queen, Elena, the King's elder daughter, now to be crowned in the fine, gold-lit ceremony London was already, that winter, beginning to prepare for.

It was in the transfer of that appointment, in the long, busy months of a Household reorganising itself around its new sovereign, that Edward Jacques first properly encountered the Queen's younger sister, the Princess Aurora.

*

He had seen her before, of course, at the periphery of things, as one saw all members of the royal family when one served in the Household: a slight, dark-haired young woman glimpsed crossing a corridor, or seated at the far end of some official dinner, dressed always with the particular correctness the Palace demanded, jewels chosen to complement rather than outshine her sister, expression composed into the pleasant, faintly distant courtesy such occasions required. He had thought of her, in so far as he had thought of her at all, as one thinks of any distant fixture of a world one serves but does not properly inhabit: present, correct, and entirely beyond his own small sphere.

Their first real conversation, if it could be called that, took place on a wet Tuesday in March, in a corridor of the Palace's private apartments where Edward had gone to deliver a message concerning the following week's engagements and found the Princess Aurora, quite alone and quite unexpectedly, seated upon a window ledge with a book laid open and entirely unread upon her knee, watching the rain come down in grey sheets across the gardens below.

She was, he noted, dressed that afternoon with none of the formal correctness of the dinners and state occasions at which he had previously observed her: a plain woollen frock the colour of damsons, her dark hair loosely pinned rather than elaborately dressed, her feet, he could not help but notice, tucked up beneath her on the window ledge in a manner no lady-in-waiting would have thought quite proper had any been present to see it. She looked, in that unguarded moment, considerably younger than her three-and-twenty years, and considerably more like an ordinary young woman caught out in a private, idle hour than like a Princess of the Blood.

"You need not look so alarmed, Group Captain," she said, before he had properly composed himself to speak. "I promise you I am not about to do anything requiring intervention. I am only watching the rain."

"I beg your pardon, Your Royal Highness. I did not mean to intrude."

"You are not intruding. You are standing in a public corridor holding what I imagine is a message for my sister, and I am the one who has made rather free with the window ledge, which is, I grant you, an odd place to find a princess on a wet afternoon." There was, in the way she said it, a dryness that caught him quite off guard, a wit he had not expected to find beneath the pleasant, composed exterior he had until then taken to be the whole of her.

"It is for Her Majesty, yes. Concerning next week's engagements."

"Then you had better go and deliver it, or I shall have delayed the business of the Crown, and that will not do at all." But she did not move from the window ledge as she said it, and something in her tone, some faint invitation he could not properly account for, made him linger a moment longer than strict correctness required.

"May I ask what you are reading, Ma'am?"

She glanced down at the book upon her knee as though she had half forgotten its presence there. "A novel. Not a very good one, I'm afraid, though I have persisted with it out of stubbornness more than pleasure. Do you read novels, Group Captain, or does the Household consider that beneath an equerry's dignity?"

"I read a good many, when I have the time for it. Though I confess I have less patience than I once had for anything that does not end well."

Something shifted in her expression at that, a flicker of interest, or perhaps only of curiosity, quickly and correctly suppressed. "That is rather a bleak philosophy for so young a man."

"I did not say I disliked unhappy endings, Ma'am. Only that I have less patience for them than I once had. There is a difference."

She had laughed then, a short, surprised sound, quickly covered, as though laughter in that particular corridor, on that particular wet afternoon, were a thing to be a little ashamed of. "I shall have to remember that distinction. Good afternoon, Group Captain."

"Good afternoon, Ma'am." He had bowed, correctly, and gone on his way to deliver his message, and had thought, walking back down the long gallery with its rows of dim, gilt-framed ancestors watching him pass, that he had not laughed himself, nor been made to laugh, in a very long while, and that there had been something in the particular quality of her laughter, quickly suppressed though it was, that he found himself turning over in his mind for rather longer than the small exchange strictly warranted.

*

He visited Thomas the following Sunday, as he did most Sundays when duty permitted, taking the train down to the small Surrey town where Cynthia now lived with her second husband, a solicitor of comfortable means named Mr Ellerby, in a red-brick villa with a neat privet hedge and a brass knocker kept, Edward always noted with a certain grim amusement, to a shine that would not have disgraced a naval vessel.

Thomas was seven that spring, a solemn, fair-haired boy who greeted his father's visits with a wariness Edward had long since learnt not to take personally, understanding well enough that a boy raised largely by his mother's account of events had little reason to think well of the father who had, in that account, abandoned them both.

They walked, as they generally did, along the towpath by the river, Thomas in a grey school coat a size too large for him, evidently bought with an eye to next year's growth, his hands thrust deep into his pockets against the March wind, and Edward beside him in his own greatcoat, matching his stride to the boy's shorter one with the particular care he had learnt these visits required.

"Mother says you've a new position," Thomas said, after some minutes of silence broken only by the cry of a moorhen somewhere among the reeds. "At the Palace."

"That's right. I'm equerry to the Queen now. I was to the old King before her."

"What does an equerry do?"

"A great many small things that add up to rather a lot of standing about, if I'm honest with you. I arrange engagements, I ride beside the carriage on state occasions, I make certain things run to time that would otherwise run late. It is not so grand as it sounds."

Thomas considered this with the particular gravity he brought to most things, a gravity Edward suspected the boy had adopted, consciously or not, as a kind of armour against a world that had given him rather more reason for solemnity than most boys of seven ought properly to have. "Have you seen the Queen? Properly, I mean. Spoken to her."

"I have, once or twice. She is a good deal younger than you might imagine from her photographs, and a good deal more serious besides."

"And the Princess? The young one. There was a picture of her in the paper Mother had, in a blue dress, at the coronation preparations."

Edward found, to his own faint surprise, that he had to consider his answer rather longer than the simple question warranted. "I have spoken with her also. Briefly."

"What is she like?"

"Clever," Edward said, after a moment, "and rather funnier than I think anyone gives her credit for being." He was aware, saying it, of a warmth in his own voice he had not quite intended to reveal, and was grateful that Thomas, still young enough to take such statements at face value, showed no sign of remarking upon it.

They walked on a while longer in silence, the river running grey and swollen beside them with the spring melt, until Thomas said, in the abrupt, unguarded manner of children broaching subjects they have privately turned over for some time before finding the courage to voice them: "Mother says you didn't want us. That's why you went away to the war and didn't come back properly, even after."

Edward stopped walking. It took him a moment to trust his own voice sufficiently to answer, and when he did, he crouched, so as to bring himself level with the boy's solemn grey eyes, heedless of the mud that would certainly mark the knee of his trousers.

"That isn't true, Thomas, and I should like you to hear me say so plainly, so that you needn't wonder about it any longer than you already have. I went to the war because every man of my age was obliged to go, not because I wished to leave your mother, and not, whatever else was true between us by the time I came home, because I did not want you. I did not know you existed, properly, until you were born, and from the hour I first held you I have wanted nothing else so much as to be a proper father to you, whatever difficulties have stood in the way of it since."

Thomas studied him with the frank, unnerving directness of a child deciding whether or not to believe an adult's account of a complicated matter he is too young to properly untangle for himself. "Then why don't you live with us?"

"Because the law decided your mother should have the raising of you, after we parted, and because your mother has since made a home with Mr Ellerby that I have no right to disturb. It does not mean I have stopped wanting to see you, or that I ever shall." He straightened, his knee cold and damp from the towpath mud, and put a hand, briefly, on the boy's shoulder. "I know it does not always feel like enough, Thomas. I wish very much that I could offer you more than Sunday afternoons and the occasional letter. But what I can offer, you may always be certain of."

Thomas did not answer this directly, in the manner of children who have received more honesty than they quite know how to receive gracefully, but he did, as they resumed their walk, drift a little closer to his father's side than he had walked before, and did not, when Edward's hand found his shoulder again a few minutes later, shrug it away.

They walked on until the light began to fail, the river turning from grey to a deep, bruised violet as the afternoon wore into evening, and Edward, watching his son's solemn profile against the darkening water, thought, not for the first time, that there was a particular kind of grief in loving a child one was permitted to see only in stolen, borrowed afternoons, a grief no decree absolute had troubled itself to account for.

He returned Thomas to the red-brick villa as the first lamps were being lit along the street, and stood a moment at the gate watching the boy go in at the door, pausing once to look back and lift a hand in a small, solemn wave before Mrs Ellerby, waiting within, drew him inside and shut the door against the cold.

*

Edward returned to London that evening on a train grown dark and cold with the failing of the March light, his own reflection ghostly in the carriage window against the blur of passing fields, and found his thoughts turning, with a persistence he told himself was merely the natural consequence of an idle journey, not to Thomas, whom he had left in reasonably good spirits at his mother's gate, but to a window ledge in the Palace's private apartments, and a princess in a damson-coloured frock who read novels she did not much enjoy out of stubbornness, and who laughed as though laughter itself were a small, private rebellion against everything the Crown required her to be.

He told himself, watching the dark fields slide past the carriage window, that it was nothing, that a man in his position, with a divorce still fresh enough in memory to bar him from a dozen drawing rooms that would once have welcomed him readily, had no business turning his thoughts toward a Princess of the Blood, however briefly amusing an afternoon's conversation with her had proved. He told himself this with some conviction, and with rather less success at believing it than he would have liked, and was still turning the matter over, unresolved, when the train drew at last into the lit, smoke-hazed cavern of the London terminus, and the ordinary business of his life reasserted itself around him once again: the porter's whistle, the hiss of steam along the platform, the damp, coal-scented chill of an English evening closing in.

But something had shifted, quietly, in that wet March corridor, in the particular quality of a laugh quickly suppressed, and Edward Jacques, who had learnt during the war to recognise the small, unremarkable moments that later proved, in hindsight, to have changed everything, suspected, even as he told himself otherwise, that this was one such moment, and that he would not, whatever else occurred, forget the sight of her upon that window ledge, feet tucked beneath her, watching the rain.

He walked home that night through streets still hung with the last, tattered remnants of coronation bunting, sodden now and forgotten, and let himself into his rooms, where Mrs Pettifer had left a small fire banked in the grate and a note propped against the mantel clock reminding him of his engagements for the following week, and sat a long while in the dark before the dying fire, his greatcoat still buttoned, thinking of Thomas's solemn wave at the gate, and of a window ledge, and of a laugh he could not quite persuade himself to set aside.