Midnight in Westminster Abbey by Sean Dennis Cashman

Author:Sean Dennis Cashman [Cashman, Sean Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781528904315
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2019-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

TWO-FOR-ONE: JAMES VI AND I

Georgie thought this man was an odd-looking fellow as he moved around the chancel. He had a coil of rope twisted around his upper left arm and shoulder and he was bobbing around inspecting this and measuring that. What ‘this’ and ‘that’ were Georgie could not see clearly from the middle of the nave. Sometimes the little fellow disappeared around a corner and then quickly reappeared. Bobbing around him—almost interwoven with him—was the other odd fellow, almost identical to the first. And he had a large bag of what must be pegs slung over his shoulder from which he handed individual pegs to the first worker who then hammered them into the ground one by one as markers.

As Georgie walked up to the double figures their bobbing about and interweaving became blurred. It was as if Georgie had developed double vision. When Georgie was almost upon the pair, he saw that they were not really two people but one whose head and shoulders kept uniting and dividing. Georgie would never have used such an old-fashioned expression as ‘curiouser and curiouser’—especially since he was with Ginny—but that was what he thought.

Without any introduction, the workman laid down his tools, looked Georgie up and down with his four eyes and said not unkindly, “Confused, are you, laddie? There’s no need. You see, I am the original Two-For-One. I am James VI of Scotland and James I of England.”

Georgie saw it was true. For behind the compact body of King James VI of Scotland, a king with brown hair tinged with red, was a look-alike figure. So this was James I of England, distant cousin and successor to Elizabeth I.

Now standing beside Georgie, Ginny sensed what was coming—not just two characters in one divided person but two heads and two busts. Just as Ginny and Georgie were guessing what might happen next, the king would divide and appear twice. His Scottish upper body seemed strait-laced and confined yet with slightly tousled hair and scruffy clothes. His English persona seemed more sophisticated and composed.

The young guests also noted two shadowy attendants waiting patiently in the murky background: a lion and a unicorn. Georgie wanted to go straight up to the fabulous unicorn and inspect it but Ginny signalled that this might be thought rude by a king hide-bound by ritual and etiquette. Besides, the double-sided king was diverting enough to compel complete attention.

As James switched seamlessly from his English to his Scottish persona and back again, the two images changed places—the Scots figure supplanting the English persona and vice versa. When James spoke as king of Scotland, it was with a Scots accent, punctuated with such expressions as ‘Ochs’ and some Scottish burrs. When he spoke as king of England, it was with a Brit-twit accent polished like upper-crust glass so as to make him intelligible to his English courtiers and interspersed with some theatrical, ‘luvvies’, ‘darlings’ and, ‘dear hearts’. Whether English or Scottish, where there was an ‘r’ in a word, James rolled it out with exaggerated relish.

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