Your Royal Hostage (14 page)

'It seems that Royal Weddings in general leave them cold,' grunted Pompey. Was he showin
g signs of sharing the feelings
of the
ira
on this issue if no other?

'I seem to remember that they made a statement to that effect at the time of Prince Andrew's bash. Unlike the rest of the world who get keener and keener. Has Mrs Pompey -'

'She has, God bless her. Red, white, and blue begonias. I planted them out at eleven o'clock last night. Ouch.' He winced.

'I went along the route today on a recce. And to the Cathedral with my American pals. Saw some very fine begonias on the way." But Pompey only winced again as if in sympathy with fellow planters throughout London.

'A city prepares
. More than one way of preparing,' was all he said.

Jemima had been well aware that it was necessary for her to follow the royal route if she was to be able to provide us audiences, sleepily awakening to this archaic British ceremony, with enough entrancing anecdotes to make it worth their while,
tus
had provided a cheerful English driver named Harry but Jemima chose to sit in the back seat with Susanna Blanding. The latter sat with her head bowed over a clipboard, occasionally looking out of the window in order to reconcile passing buildings with her notes. Rick sat in the front seat (there was no sign of Curt, whose absence Rick explained rather vaguely along the lines of, 'I guess the guy slept late').

Unfortunately the comments of cheerful Harry - with which he had been enlightening tourists for years, so he told them -were somewhat at variance with those of Susanna. Nor did she accept the variance tamely. Rick had asked her not to smoke in the car, a prohibition which she had accepted but which undoubtedly increased her professional irritability.

'Queen Elizabeth
ii
was
not
born at Number One London,' she explained indignantly at one point. 'Number One London is Apsley House, home of the Duke of Wellington as I would have thought absolutely anyone knew.' Susanna scowled at the driver's back.

'You win some, you lose some,' was all Harry said in reply, infuriatingly jovial. 'Any of you ladies like to know the origin of the Wellington Boot?'

Rick in the front seat moved restlessly: there was no telephone in the car, an administrative error he was determined should not be repeated.

'A lot of flat roofs round here,' he said suddenly. 'Susy sweetheart,' Rick turned round and gazed tenderly into her earnest face. 'Could you hold on that historical stuff for the time being? We have a security situation here that I'd like to talk through with Jemima.'

'Of course, Rick.' Susanna subsided. This confirmed Jemima's fear that Rick's handsome face and agreeable tones were making Susanna's heart beat significantly faster; it was noticeable that Susanna pardoned in Rick an almost total lack of interest in British history which she would have found unforgivable in anyone else.

'For instance, do you have some good assassination stuff there?' Since he was still looking at Susanna, it was she who answere
d, albeit hesi
tantly.

'Do you want historical assassinations? I can do you William the Silent. The Duke of Guise. That sort of thing. I'm afraid they do tend to be men, by the way. Unfortunately women weren't often assassinated in those underprivileged days.' As Jemima wryly noticed the principles of sexual equality being applied even in this unlikely area, Susanna continued more brightly: 'There was the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, of course - now she was assassinated. That was a good one. And it so happens that Prince Ferdinand himself is descended —'

'No, Susy, no.' The melodious tenderness was in danger of wearing thin.

'I take it you want the Roman Catholic Cathedral,' interrupted Harry, not necessarily out of any sense of diplomacy. 'See the spire if you duck and crane your head. Its exact height is —'

Rick Vancy found his fingers itching for a telephone to transport him to a wider world.

Just as Harry swung the large dark-blue car into the road leading to the Cathedral's piazza, Susanna gave a little squeak.

'Look! The Guards! Dressed up for rehearsal! Their history is absolutely fascinating—' She looked nervously at Rick's back. But even Rick was murmuring approvingly: 'Great pageantry.'

Suddenly to Jemima the scarlet-coated guards, their heavy cuirasses and plumed helmets gleaming in the sun, the jangling bridles and sweating flanks of the huge black horses, spoke not of pageantry - nor of history - but of violence and threat. Once upon a time men dressed like this or something like this, had ridden to battle to ride down other men dressed similarly. Now their role was apparently merely ceremonial: the visible guarding of the monarchy on occasions of official pageantry. Plus various clanking trots applauded by tourist London. Yet not so long ago men like this had died in London itself in an outbreak of terrorist bombing. Someone took the ceremonial sufficiently seriously to blow them to bits. Horses like this had suffered an even worse fate if you took the line that the horses had not voluntarily enlisted 
in the service of the State And if the horses and guards were worth sacrificing, what price the equally ceremonial figures that they guarded?

As Rick observed in a most melodious voice: 'Where pageantry is concerned, the rest of the world is over the hill compared to you Brits.'
Jemima shivered.

The lofty twilight interior of the great Byzantine-style cathedral, with its glinting mosaics and towering bands of green and rose marble, came as a relief. Jemima's morbid thoughts vanished as she observed with interest the considerable quantity of people - worshippers, tourists? - moving at some speed through the various aisles. It was four o'clock on a weekday afternoon. It was not just the advancing priests in their traditional long black vestments or the busy nuns (whose short skirts and briefly veiled, mainly uncovered hair would have been witnessed with horror by Jemima's old headmistress Mother Ancilla). There were quite as many lay people bustling about and the judicious development of the Catholic Church since Jemima's schooldays (a Protestant, she had attended a Catholic school) was attested by a large exhibition of photographs concerning relief in the third world.

'Good heavens, there's my cousin Lydia Q
uentin,' exclaimed Susanna, ‘I
didn't know she was a Catholic these days. Still I wouldn't put it past her. I wouldn't put anything past Lydia. Poor
Ione
, that's Princess Amy's lad
y-in-waiting, you know her, the
ever calm one, she's had
a
ghastly time with Lydia. Ever since he
r father died, the famous Colone
l Q, you've probably heard of him,
terrifying
! But rather marvellous. Then the house and everything had to be sold. What with that and her mother, Lydia picks up with the most terrible people - Moonies, Trots, people like that. Then
Ione
has to come and rescue her.' Susanna had on her important voice with which she generally imparted historical information. 'Now I suppose it's subversive nuns.'

Jemima gazed at a distinctly thin and rather pale girl. There was some resemblance to
Ione
Quentin, not only because both had dark hair; but where
Ione
radiated quiet strength, one would scarcely suppose that this frail creature possessed any strength at all. Cousin Susanna, with her sturdy frame, was a third version of the same model.

In one of the side chapels, behind a silver grille with its gates open, Lydia Quentin was kneeling as though in prayer in front of a large mosaic picture. Banks of little yellow candles twinkled on a stand outside. There was no nun, subversive or otherwise, to be seen. In fact Lydia Quentin was kneeling in a row with several other people and there were further people bent in prayer behind her. It struck Jemima that this was an especially popular shrine. The next door chapels were empty. Given the fact that their lips were moving in prayer, it occurred to her that this little group, if it was a group, might be taking part in some communal novena. Which said, the afternoon was an odd time for it to take place.

Jemima knew she should really be concentrating on the interior of the cathedral. This was her opportunity since
tus
like all other foreign stations would not be allowed to have a camera inside the cathedral on the day itself,
tus
would be obliged to take the
bbc
coverage with their own commentary superimposed as necessary. The
tus
team would thus be installed in a specially built studio overlooking the piazza. All the same, curiosity - or perhaps even the famous instinct to which Pompey sometimes gallantly alluded - drove Jemima to investigate this popular or populated chapel further. The mosaic showed a man in monk's clothing, his hands outstretched, a group of birds perched upon them.

This must be the chapel of St Francis. White marble lettering surrounded by an acanthus border confirmed the fact. A rather less elegant wooden box nearby had a slit for donations and for candles (there was a large heap of candles in another box on the floor). Jemima wondered why she persisted in feeling the kneeling people were united in some common cause. The empty chapel next door was dedicated to St Paul; perhaps St Francis was more in keeping with the spirit of the times than St Paul. But then, further down, the chapel of St Patrick was empty too and it could certainly be argued that St Patrick had kept up with the times. For a moment she had even thought they were talking to each other instead of praying - which was absurd.

Lydia Quentin for example was kneeling next to a young man in a T-shirt with some conventionally protesting slogan on it. She was now gazing intensely in front of her. The young man turned his head and briefly his eyes met those of Jemima. There was no recognition in them although Jemima, with her distinctive colouring, apart from anything else, was used to the surprised flicker which the public sometimes accorded her, springing from the true late twentieth-century familiarity of television. Oddly enough, in this case it was Jemima who felt she might have seen the man somewhere before ... somewhere recently ... the wedding ... what was it ... the memory nagged at her and vanished.

It was fortunate that the man known to his fellow worshippers as Beagle was a sufficiently common type for there to be no certainty.

'Nosy bitch,' said Beagle in a low voice. 'If you'll pardon my language in this house of prayer. Jemima Shore Investigator as ever is. Not satisfied with that interview and all that royal rubbish.'

'Do you know her?' asked Chicken, kneeling on the other side of Beagle.

'I sat next to her at the Press Conference. I came in late. She won't remember. And even if she does - what's
she
doing here I want to know?'

'Same as us, I dare say,' murmured Chicken drily.

'Not
quite
the same as us, I hope, dear.' Pussy shifted the parcel at her feet and plunged her face once more into her hands.

Of the members of the Innoright cell, only Monkey was a practising Catholic. It was Monkey, with his usual sense of planning suffused with irony, who had suggested the cathedral for a meeting place, and the statue of St Francis, patron saint of animals, for the rendezvous.

'The Church. Another place where anyone sits next to anyone, as you put it, my dear Miss Lamb. Like the Underground.'

Fox, however, if not actually a Catholic (he had never been officially converted) was a man of romantic temperament who, in his single life with Noel, often dropped into Soho churches. He was not exactly seeking God, more enjoying the incense and music and above all admiring the vestments - a busman's holiday from his own work. When had he not loved costumes, dressing-up? It was a passion rooted deep in his unhappy childhood. Fox however had not turned his head at Jemima's approach. He took the opportunity of the respite to pray, a frequent prayer that he would somehow die with Noel; Noel who had been parked, panting, outside many churches and was in fact waiting panting outside the cathedral now.

Chicken, raised as an Anglican, had long ago abandoned that wishy-washy religion as she saw it, for a single-minded adherence to her campaign for the rights of the innocent. She felt marginally uncomfortable in her present Catholic situation but as a disciplined person, she was used to putting up with such things in the cause of Innoright. Pussy on the other hand, although she literally detested the Catholic Church for daring to state that animals, unlike slaughtering, meat-gorging humans, had no souls, had been raised by a Polish Catholic mother. She thus slumped down easily in her pew, crossed herself quite naturally and in general looked much like all the other middle-aged women with shopping bags scattered round the cathedral.

Jemima Shore wandered away to rejoin Susanna and Rick. Monkey was the last person to catch her eye: this was because this prosperous-looking person, conventionally dressed, appeared to be praying aloud.

'So, ladies and gentlemen of Inn
oright, fellow animals -' began
Monkey again. Even at simulated prayer, Monkey's voice was sonorous.