Playing Dirty(87)

“I’ve spoken to Rogers about it,” she continued. Rogers was the head of the household staff, a butler by any other name and a man who would’ve been a general had he been born in a time of war. “And he agrees that we need to take on more staff for general upkeep. Around thirty or so.”

“What has this got to do with us?” Michael asked. It might be our house, but hiring and firing was Rogers’ domain.

“As a monarch,” our mother continued, “running this house is like running the country. The real work is done by someone else, either Rogers or that dreadful little man in Number 10, while the monarch is a figurehead—ruler in name alone. But, every once in a while, for the look of things or simply to reconnect so as to remember that we are all one in humanity, it is necessary and desirable for the monarch to get their hands dirty and do some actual work.”

She looked directly at me and kept going. “I want you to decide exactly who to hire, Andrew, and when that is done, I want you to assign duties to the new staff. Rogers will give you their CVs and so on, and you should take advice from him, but the final decisions about where they work and what they do will be yours. It will be a useful experience of actually doing something.”

I nodded. “That makes sense,” I said, although I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of assigning cleaning duties to thirty-odd new staff members.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’m being punished for going to that bar in New York, aren’t I?” I asked.

“Yes, you are,” she said without any attempt to hide it. “But that doesn’t mean that what I said about the monarch getting their hands dirty isn’t true. Which is why I wanted you both to hear it. Society has deemed us above our fellow men, but nature ranks us all together. As does God. And in the end it is them that you should listen to.”



***



Over the next couple of weeks, I trawled through the hundreds upon hundreds of CVs, references, background checks and career retrospectives, and I wondered if God or nature really cared about who I chose to clean the bathrooms. But my mother had a point—it was easy to become distanced from the people, and there were a lot of paintings hung around the place of various ancestors being beheaded that told you exactly what happened when royalty lost touch with the people.

My first thought on sitting down to work had been: why the hell are all these people so keen to clean up after me? But once I’d re-thought the question with a little more humility, I realized that they weren’t; they just needed a job and this one paid much better than most cleaning positions. I was somewhat proud of the fact that I understood, even if it took me a little time to get there.

To me there seemed little to choose from between the applicants—how was I to know who would make a good maid? And once I’d decided that, how the hell was I meant to know which of them were best suited to the kitchens and which ones were suited for the bedrooms? What difference did it make? But, with the advice of Rogers, I made the selections, deciding who should be reassigned and who should be brought in for a chat before the final decision. There was only one on whom I went against Rogers’ advice.

“An American, your Highness?” Rogers arched a thick eyebrow, something he had been taught to do by a father and grandfather who had also been in the trade.

“I like Americans.”

Rogers pursed his lips in consideration. “I suppose they are fine in their place. That place being America.” I often got the impression that Rogers still thought of America as ‘The Colonies’. “But this woman has lied on her CV,” he continued. “She’s fudged some dates regarding how much experience she has.”

“Really? How can you tell?”

“It is a knack, your Highness.”

“Well, we’re still having her in for a chat,” I said with finality. “I like the name Keira.”

Rogers sniffed and cleared his throat. He clearly didn’t think that liking a name was adequate rationale for employment, but he said nothing as I placed the CV of Keira Valencia on the interview pile.

Of course, I knew that this Keira Valencia was not the Keira I’d met in the bar in New York; the Keira who had occupied my thoughts so much of late…the Keira who had seemed to make all other women so much less appealing. That was far too unlikely. But I liked the name, and the fact that it couldn’t be the same girl didn’t matter.

“Oh, this is her picture,” Rogers said, bending down to the carpeted floor. “Must have slipped out of the folder. Rather nice-looking young lass.”