Winston snorted. ‘Look sharp,’ said he.
CHAPTER 7
One of the highlights of life as a royal corgi happens every Friday morning, when we’re fed our weekly bone. Each of us in turn is presented with a delicious, meat-encrusted shank. We carry our treasure to a spot in the small staff garden or, if the weather is inclement, a corner of the laundry, where we give free rein to our atavistic urges, gnawing, grinding and chewing for the next hour in a state of contentment.
You can tell something about a canine from the way he eats his bone, don’t you think? Winston would attack his with gusto, snorting and slavering with wanton abandon. No less eager, Margaret gnawed her bone with diligent rigour, removing every last scrap of meat from one end to the other. Having never seen a bone before joining the royal household, I was initially unsure what to do with it. But within a few minutes I had taken to the delights of shank chewing, relishing the tasty, marrow-mashing, tooth-sharpening joy of it.
When the bone chewing came to an end, I observed another interesting difference between Winston and Margaret. His jaws tender from all the clenching and tugging, Winston would take his bone to the side of the garden, where small terracotta pots were stacked, and drop it beside them, next to several other bones from Fridays past.
Margaret h
ad a very different notion of bone disposal. Making her way to the flowerbed at the back of the garden, she’d use both paws and snout to dig a hole that was deep enough to conceal what remained of her bone, before covering it up with loose soil. She’d emerge from the flowerbed, her nose and face unfamiliarly smudged with earth. But she’d have an air of quiet accomplishment about her.
The first time I witnessed this, I felt a curious tug. Some deep-down instinct that I’d never known I possessed impelled me to do the same thing. Picking up my own bone, I made my way over to the flowerbed, placing it at the side. ‘We’re supposed to bury bones?’ I queried, as she covered up her own, all four paws flicking the soil with practised ease.
‘Waste not, want not,’ she said.
I couldn’t avoid looking over to where Winston was dropping his by the flowerpots, rather casually I thought. ‘Why isn’t Winston burying his?’
‘You’ll have to ask him,’ she replied.
As it happened, Winston was making his way towards us. ‘An ancient canine instinct,’ he nodded towards where Margaret was making her way off the flowerbed to begin wiping her snout on the lawn. ‘Preserving food in case of future shortages.’
I registered this with interest. ‘Have royal corgis ever gone short?’ I asked.
‘Never,’ he replied emphatically.
‘The past does not equal the future,’ observed Margaret quietly. While she didn’t hesitate to disagree with Winston from time to time, she would always do so with a genuine regard for his elder corgi status.
‘True,’ he agreed with equanimity.
Wondering what to do with the bone between my front paws, I asked Winston: ‘You don’t think there will be shortages?’
He cocked his head. ‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘but that’s not why I leave my bones above ground.’
I could tell he was in one of his enigmatic moods, which was confirmed by what he went on to say: ‘There are many ways to hide a thing. Concealing it underground is one way. Another is to hide it in plain sight.’
‘But . . .’ I struggled to understand him, ‘if something is in plain sight, doesn’t that mean it’s not hidden?’
Margaret was pretending to be deeply absorbed in removing loose soil from her snout with her front paw. Winston fixed me with a knowing expression. ‘That is what common sense might tell you, dear boy,’ he said. ‘But not all sense is common. Look sharp.’
I had ended up leaving my bone behind the low, outdoor shed housing the rubbish bins, an action which became engrained as habit over time. But every Friday, when we sat with our bones, I would also gnaw over Winston’s words about things being hidden in plain sight. What could he possibly mean?
I began to discover the answer to this quite some months later. Regrettably, Winston wasn’t present at the time. It was during the deepest of wintry days in January, with the outside world a place of unremitting bleakness, the branches of the trees outside Windsor Castle stark and barren and the grey skies leaden with rain. The Queen was just emerging from a very bad cold and it seemed that poor Winston had also succumbed to a seasonal bug, as he was eating less food than usual and with none of his customary zeal. He had taken to spending a great deal of time in his basket.
All three of us were with Her Majesty in her private sitting room one afternoon when, having glanced at the clock, she rose from her chair and made her way towards the door. Winston remained in his basket, his breathing laboured. Margaret looked up, ears alert. She was usually punctilious about accompanying Her Majesty on even the most routine of encounters, but that afternoon she seemed not to realise that the Queen was on her way to a meeting.
I followed Her Majesty when she left the sitting room. Her movements were slow but deliberate, on account of her still somewhat frail state. She took her time slipping into her coat and making her way from her private quarters. I had no idea where she was going, but I did have an idea who she was planning to meet. As I trotted along beside her, aware of my responsibilities as the only royal corgi on duty that afternoon, I knew that during her most recent appointments’ meeting with private secretary, Julian, no mention had been made of an engagement today.
‘Does the Queen ever receive unscheduled visitors?’ I remembered Winston asking me during those early months, before answering his own question emphatically. ‘Never! Nobody just drops in to see Her Majesty. Nobody, that is, except Michael.’
The Queen’s footsteps led her through the castle and, shadowed discreetly by security, in the direction of St George’s Chapel.
For me, St George’s Chapel is the most magical chamber in the whole castle. It was in this sacred place that members of the royal family had been married over the centuries. It was here that the remains of kings and queens of Britain have been interred for the past six hundred years, including those of the first Queen Elizabeth in 1492.
In the semi-darkness, with the only light coming from the lamps in the warm, wooden choir stalls and the gold of the altar, there was a sense of mysticism, of connection to other dimensions of experience. Her Majesty and I made our way to the front of the chapel, along the black and white chequered floor. Above us, rows of heraldic flags were draped from both sides of the chapel, standards of ages past, magnificent colours rich with symbolism.
As security remained discreetly at the door, the Queen went to sit in one of the choir stalls nearest the altar. Her movements fragile, she sat down carefully, contemplating the altar, before taking in much more than that. It was as though ancient mystery reverberated down the ages to this particular place, on this silent midwinter afternoon. Had the energy of extraordinary events and people become imbued in the fabric of this medieval building? Was the Queen able to slip into an experience of timelessness that enabled her to put whatever was happening in her life into different perspective? I wondered if Her Majesty visited here to be touched by the transcendent and to experience a special kind of peace.