Shadow of the Serpent

From that very moment they were in accord. She had not enjoyed her sojourn with Gladstone who had treated her like a public department. Disraeli treated her like a woman and would defend the empire to the last drop of blood. He had very lofty views.

Victoria watched him where he sat and nodded silent approval. He was her prime minister and for these six happy years they had mourned together, she for her husband Prince Albert, he for his wife Mary, though Victoria always thought the woman a bit of a flibbertigibbet while pleasant enough.

Nevertheless, Disraeli, like herself, grieved constantly. The black border round their letters had not diminished in thickness by one iota during all that time.

And within these black borders, he had courted her assiduously, a delicate chivalrous courtship which, of course, would never speak its name. A conduct most becoming.

She was Victoria Regina after all, the Empress of India, the imperial bond between them reinforced each year he stayed atop the greasy pole of politics. She felt at home with this strange creature, this Jew who had taken the Church of England as his guide and buckler. But now …?

The Queen moved away restlessly and Disraeli watched with a certain detached amusement as she glided around the room like an anxious little pigeon looking for berries.

‘I received your letter in thanks for the snowdrops, it was most … welcome,’ she said distractedly, fussing with a particularly hideous brocaded cushion which was not worth the fussing over. Indeed, were that all to Othello’s hand in the play when he sought to smother Desdemona, the poor creature might yet have lived. Even the Moor in the height of his jealous passion would not have deigned to touch such a gruesome object.

Disraeli roused himself from this meditation.

‘As were the flowers themselves, ma’am. Faerie gifts from Queen Titania.’

‘From Osborne House to be precise,’ she replied dryly. ‘Primroses will follow.’

‘Your Majesty’s sceptre has touched the enchanted isle.’

He opened his arms in an extravagant gesture as if receiving an onslaught of flowers and her lips twitched in response. He did lay on the flattery with a trowel but she bathed delightedly in the wash of words.

‘Indeed the Isle of Wight can be enchanted and so before the rest of the country.’

‘In climatic terms, most definitely,’ was his dry response.

Disraeli had, from time to time, visited her island retreat at Osborne and found little there to occupy him, except the avoidance of seagull droppings.

She sensed the cynicism and bridled a little.

‘I am aware, Mr Disraeli, that you do not hold Nature in great affection.’

He put his head to one side, like a curious tropical bird.

‘Dear madam,’ he murmured, ‘if you but command me, I shall cover myself in woad and spend the rest of my life in woodland contemplation.’

The image was so ridiculous that she burst out in laughter. He followed suit and, for a moment, the two of them guffawed like a pair of old wives at the market. Then there was silence.

‘I am reminded,’ her eyes were glinting in mischief and there was a glimpse of a younger self, ‘for a reason I cannot bring to mind, of the time my dear mother walked out of the dining room holding a fork, which she had mistaken for her fan.’

She let out another roar of laughter then put a hand up to cover her mouth as if to contain the life force.

He did the same in perfect mimicry and they looked at each other like two Wise Monkeys.

When she removed her hand, the face was once more the solemn, heavy visage which the world knew as Victoria Regina.

She turned away, went swiftly to the window and gazed out into the Mall where her subjects moved and jostled in an incessant stream, the carriages clattering, pedestrians swarming like ants, all going about their business, all with their secret thoughts. All, well at least those who were franchised, soon about to vote.

Disraeli, meantime, was in a quandary. It was a great honour to be allowed a seated audience, in fact he knew of no other person granted this privilege, and he would take care, as always, to conceal the chair behind a screen before leaving so no one might ever discern the fact. But for now he was rather incarcerated.

Like Macbeth. Cabined, cribbed, confined … and what was the rest of the quote? … bound in to saucy doubts and fears. Quite so. Quite so.

He may as well be wedged in a chamber pot. His buttocks were chafing on the stuffing of the chair, which seemed to be composed entirely of granite chips. Yet, he could not rise without Her Majesty’s permission. He was a victim of her uniquely granted privilege and favour.

The phrase amused him and his long upper lip twitched like a horse’s as he gazed around the room.

Disraeli disdained Buckingham Palace, so much of the decor seemed like some sort of vulgar wedding cake.

Above his head, a garish chandelier hung like the sword of Damocles. That phrase did not amuse, so he fixed his eyes upon the broad back of his beloved Faerie Queen.

She had assumed the throne at the age of eighteen and they thought she would come in like a lamb, but, by God, they quickly changed their tune. Forty-three years on, and she still had the heart of a lion. What nerve. What muscle. What energy. Some Faerie.

And indeed, he did love her. She was the only person left in the world that he could love. He remembered a moment not long after his wife had died when he to his Queen, quite out of the blue, a surprise even to himself, had said … ‘Every night, when I return home, I find another empty room.’

Victoria had looked at him with such feeling in her eyes. She understood the emptiness within. It was a moment of rare simplicity. They both treasured such moments.

‘Did you know,’ she still gazed out of the window, ‘that when I was very young, they used to pin a sprig of holly to the front of my dress?’

‘The Ancient Romans,’ Disraeli shifted uneasily, ‘considered the holly sprig a symbol of health and well-being, Your Majesty, and of course at Christmas time we are festooned from top to bottom with that particular evergreen.’

‘It was not for that.’ She turned back from the window. ‘It was to keep my chin up.’

‘A somewhat unnecessary precaution, I would have thought.’ He shifted buttocks again. Damn the thing.

‘You may stand, Mr Disraeli.’

He uncoiled from the chair with as much grace as his ageing bones would allow, stuck out his right leg and assumed a posture which suggested that of an actor about to deliver a long speech.

‘As Your Majesty commands.’

Disraeli took out a scented handkerchief and dabbed at his lips, the rings on his fingers glittering as he took care not to stray to where the rouge delicately enhanced the pallor of his cheeks.

‘I am told,’ Victoria said abruptly, ‘that your friends call you … Dizzy. Is that so?’

‘A derivation more than a description, my dear madam,’ he drawled, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

There was a churning in the royal stomach. She did not want to lose this man. She had been bereaved of her beloved Albert and it near broke her heart. She was unsure if the same organ could stand the prospect of losing another dear friend. It could not be.

‘You must win this election, Dizzy. You must remain my prime minister. I will not have the barbarian at my gate.’

‘The portents are promising, Your Majesty.’

Yet somewhere, despite the recent fervour created through the opening of Parliament by the Queen in her new glass coach, the Royal visage being seen from every angle, despite the recent by-election results, results so favourable they had seduced him into going to the polls in the first place, despite publicly flaying Gladstone’s Liberals as a party of appeasement who would muzzle the British bulldog, despite all this, Disraeli sensed the people might possibly alter course.

The imperial dream had spawned some puny detractors and then there was the recent fiasco of the Zulu War where the Queen’s great favourite Lord Chelmsford, a vainglorious idiot in command of the British forces, had caused the death of nearly fourteen hundred men at Isandhlwana.