Lost Autumn

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Helen had lent me an outfit for the official function and I’d changed before leaving the train too. It was terribly kind of her to realize I’d have nothing to wear and not make a fuss. She probably knew I didn’t have the money for fine clothes, but all she said was, “You’ll have been expecting to wear a uniform like poor David so you won’t have brought anything fine.” It was a navy skirt and jacket and a cream silk blouse, and she said it suited my auburn hair better than her blond.

  At the top of the hill, the prince was to deliver remarks to the government of Australia and people on behalf of his father the King. It was the speech that had caused all the trouble the day before, Helen explained. The admiral had told the prince that all he had to do was to lay a foundation stone, that there was no need for a speech if he didn’t want to speak, but Helen had prepared remarks and the colonel had rewritten them and then the prince and Helen had rewritten them again and then the prince had decided he wouldn’t speak, as the admiral had suggested.

  “Who knows what will happen?” Helen said. “Sure to be splendid, if only in the newspapers tomorrow.” She smiled and winked at me.

  The prince soon arrived and emerged from the car. Again, he largely ignored the official party—government ministers for the new national government, and the New South Wales premier—and went instead to the small group of women all in black who’d come out to see him.

  “H.R.H. always stops for them and offers his family’s condolences,” Mr. Waters said to me. “It’s the part Colonel Grigg doesn’t really understand.”

  Although the prince hadn’t noticed me since introducing himself the day before, I felt I was now a member of the team of people who supported him, with Mr. Waters and Helen including me in everything. I’d read so many of the letters written to the prince and I saw now what those letter writers saw: hope after so many hopeless years in which everyone experienced loss. Now I’d seen for myself how decent he was toward those he met, especially the ex-servicemen and families.

  I thought of my father. Daddy would be so proud of me now, writing as a prince and attending an important speech. I reminded myself to note it all in my book. If you’re going to be a writer, you write down everything. Daddy had drilled that into me from an early age. I was already behind on the events of the day before. I didn’t want to miss anything.

  Running more than an hour late now, the prince joined the official party on the top of the hill, where a tent had been set up for lunch. They’d constructed a wooden stand and the foundation stone was an enormous thing, held in place by chains the prince would release.

  Several ministers of the federal government spoke about the remarkable progress that had been made in constructing the new capital. I had seen the cartoons in the newspaper about the capital site, for a first foundation stone was laid in 1913, but seven years had passed and nothing more had happened. The ministers spoke at length. The prince looked bored.

  Finally, it was the prince’s turn to speak. He stood at the dais and it somehow grew him. He took a good long moment to look around him, as if conjuring the capital in his own mind. He’d visited Canada the year before, he said, where Ottawa was already built. “Canberra is to be built as a capital from the very first, and offers a splendid opportunity to Australian architects. I hope they will be proud of what they do here.”

  “It’s always like this,” Helen said to me. “He knows he has to do a speech but he doesn’t want to, then he’s forced to make it up on the spot. You never know what will come out.” She was smiling. “That’s what Ned hates. He wants a seamless empire, and he’s got never-know-what-will-happen-next David. I’m just glad I got something ready now because today, for once, he’s following my script!”

  The prince was standing in front of the gathered dignitaries, wearing that smile once again, full of youthful joy but tinged with sadness. Perhaps it was the weight of the responsibility on him, the throne that sat immutable as his destiny, but it was the sadness under his smile that made him beautiful.

  People had moved to the surrounding hillside to get a view. There were hundreds now, a sea of hats and coats, to listen to the prince.

  “I consider,” he said, “that it is a very great privilege to be asked to lay the foundation stone.”

  “Uh-oh,” Helen said. “We’re veering off script again.”

  He paused for a long moment. “In fact, I understand that, at the present moment, Canberra consists chiefly of foundation stones.”

  He paused, the crowd laughing and applauding.

  The prince nodded and waved.

  Just then, Colonel Grigg walked up behind us. “Was that yours?” I heard him say to Helen.

  “Nope,” she said. “That’s him, Ned, all him. So if you have a problem, I suggest you take it up with your future king.”

  Colonel Grigg snorted. “All him? All Halsey, more like.”

  “Halsey doesn’t do humor,” Helen said. “He does what he’s told.”

  “By David?”

  She shook her head. “Anyway, I suspect Halsey thinks this is all nonsense. He’d prefer we sail around Australia with guns at the ready, and not actually stop anywhere.”

  “The admiral is from a world that’s gone,” the colonel said. “The reality is, this country is at risk.”

  Helen turned to regard him. “From those koalas?”

  “Yes,” Grigg said. “Koalas and the Bolshies. We’re here to fix it.”

  Helen laughed. “Then God help the empire,” she said. “If it’s you doing the fixing, I mean.”

  “Do you know, if you didn’t write so brilliantly, I wouldn’t put up with you?” Colonel Grigg said.

  “If you didn’t put up with me, I’d be reporting directly to David, my dear,” Helen said.

  “Is that right?”

  “It most certainly is,” Helen said. “And we’d probably all be just a little happier.”

  Colonel Grigg smiled widely, but he looked just like a big circus bear trying to smile and it was anything but friendly.

  The prince was finished now. The crowd roared approval. He had taken them all away, including the newspapermen, and no one but Colonel Grigg seemed to mind his little impromptu joke about foundation stones.

  “That was fair enough,” Helen said. “This is the seventh one that’s been laid. Anyway,” she added, “they love him.”

  “Yes, but at home, they won’t love this. They won’t love this in any way,” Colonel Grigg said. “I wish I could just make him do the right thing.”

  “Maybe a puppet would help,” Helen said.

  He laughed. “That, my dear girl, is an excellent suggestion.”

  After the ceremony was completed, they showed the prince the sites for various buildings, the parliament, the war memorial. I didn’t accompany them. I excused myself to Mr. Waters and returned to the train to keep drafting replies to the letters. Helen told me later it was all just bushland, so it was hard to get a sense of how the place might look. But the crowd seemed to have swelled during the day so that, when they were leaving, in every direction there were just hats like mushrooms that grew from the ground wherever the prince had walked.

  Helen and I ate dinner together in the staff dining car—roast beef with mash and peas—and then the train left to return to Sydney. I didn’t see the prince again. I don’t know where we pulled up for the night. I worked my way through more than two hundred letters, and I could probably still tell you exactly what I did with each one, by subject if not by name.

  Helen told me we could do whatever we wanted, within reason, and so I made a note, clipped to each draft reply, for that first boy to receive a train ticket to see the speech, another family to have a set of commemorative cups (for they’d missed out), still others to have a personalized letter about their personal experience of loss. I suppose, looking back, each time I helped one of these families broken by the war, I helped my
own family broken by the war, or thought I did.

  I hardly noticed the return journey on the train. According to Helen, we made a stop at Bungendore so that the prince could meet the people he’d missed in the morning. We then stopped at two other small towns where people had driven for miles to catch sight of him. He spent more time in these places than he had at the capital site.

  “Did you not notice the fires?” Helen asked when she came in with tea. In many places along the route there were enormous bonfires lit in his honor.

  “I’ve been trying to get these finished,” I said. I was feeling the weight of responsibility, for I only had a few hours left. If I could at least catch up, they might be able to manage from there.

  I drafted replies and suggested action on all the most difficult letters. Most of the remaining ones really only needed some variation of the agreed form letter. I also had a list of instructions for the staff at Government House: this one to be refunded a train fare to Sydney because he’d come to see the prince but the visit was canceled when the schedule changed; that one to be included in the meeting with charities organized for later in the week in Sydney as they’d missed out on shaking the prince’s hand when he visited Jervis Bay and they had run a canteen during the fighting in France.

  Mr. Waters could assign a typist at Government House to the form letters and focus on making sure that the things the prince had said would happen actually transpired. I hadn’t finished the job, I knew, but I would leave them in much better shape than where they started.

  * * *

  The next morning I ate a quick breakfast in the staff dining car—porridge with brown sugar and cream—and returned to my desk to keep going with the letters. I’d noticed Ruby Rivers going back and forth from the prince’s private dining room with trays. I was glad I was doing this other job; a more important job, I knew.

  Helen came in from her office. “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

  “Like a log,” I said. “The rocking.” We’d gone to bed while the train was still moving. It didn’t stop until the prince was ready to retire.

  “Yes, it works for people our size.”

  Without waiting for my response, she said, “There’s something I really should have mentioned yesterday, and it’s rather delicate. Actually, it woke me in the middle of the night with terror and I nearly woke you then.”

  She had a letter in her hand that she’d taken from the pile. “You see these letters with the spider seal?”

  I nodded. I’d noticed the seal the day before but hadn’t got to the letter yet. She handed it to me.

  “Thank God,” she said. “We don’t open those. He opens them himself. I shouldn’t have left that one there.”

  “Who are they from?” I said, looking at the pretty handwriting.

  She put a finger to her lips, widened her eyes, plucked the letter from my hands.

  Then she said, “H.R.H. writes back and uses the same seal. He and his . . . friend each have one. We post them and receive them. We don’t even record them. They don’t exist.” She smiled. “And his letters go back with the diplomatic pouch. That’s the one that goes straight to London, using every ship and train at His Majesty’s disposal to be quick about it.”

  I looked at the back of the envelope. “They must be very important,” I said. “So, can you tell me who F.D.W. is?” These were the initials on the back, with an address in London.

  She put her finger to her lips again. “Sometimes there are a lot of letters,” she said. “But if there are none, make yourself scarce.” She grinned.

  I sniffed the envelope. It was perfumed.

  “Exactly,” Helen said. “I didn’t say mistress.”

  Just then the prince came in from his private compartments. “Here are the busy bees,” he said. “What are you girls doing?” He was wearing a cream cardigan over a light blue shirt and the brown slacks today, with slippers on his feet.

  “We’re just talking about the mail, sir,” Helen said, taking the envelope with the spider seal from me and tucking it under the rest so he wouldn’t see it. “We can’t believe the number of letters. You have quite a following, Maddie tells me.”

  “Is that right?” he said to me. “Fools. They have no idea who they’re writing to.” He made a noise, not quite a laugh.

  I blushed, found myself tongue-tied once more. I longed for Helen’s confidence.

  “Well?” he said, still looking at me. “You think they know their prince?” He looked more calm this morning, I thought. Helen had said the night before that the stunts stressed him and then he had to take a few days to get ready for the next one. But the trouble was there were no gaps in the schedule in which he might actually do that.

  “I do,” I managed to say. He had such beauty, those light blue eyes, that blond hair and a glow to his skin as if he were lit from within, the sadness of that countenance at rest.

  Mr. Waters came in behind him then and rescued me. “It’s Maddie who writes all the replies, so she should know, sir.”

  “How very splendid,” he said. “You know, I noticed last night that the letters were more modern than they used to be. Rupert is such a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to how things are done. I like very much that we are friendly as far as possible. Is that you?”

  I nodded, still dumb.

  Helen laughed. “Her father is the poet,” she said. “Thomas Bright. I know his work. It’s uplifting in a time of sorrow, although you might not know she’s related to him to talk to her in person right now.” She elbowed me subtly. “Maddie seems to have lost contact with her normally vivacious self.”

  “Well, it’s wonderful to have the daughter of the poet among us,” the prince said. He smiled so warmly I felt the honor of it. I felt he must be used to people being tongue-tied in the royal presence and he was making it as easy as he could for me.

  “Sir, thank you,” I said. “I am so pleased to serve.”

  “So am I,” he said. “So am I.”

  He stood very erect, I noticed, and his hands kept going to the front of his trousers as if to smooth the creases, or perhaps correct them to keep his father happy.

  His gaze remained on me, his expression turning quizzical. “I’m sorry to be staring, but do I know you?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so, no, sir,” I said. “I came to see you with my family when you arrived, but I doubt you saw me as we were several miles away. I may have spotted your hand waving from a carriage.”

  He laughed then. “I knew I knew you. You were one of the twenty thousand. I have a memory for faces.”

  I must have looked shocked.

  “A little joke,” he said, grinning now. He regarded me a moment longer and then turned behind him to Mr. Waters.

  “Have you seen the telegram? It seems I was right about His Majesty on this occasion.” I could hear from his voice that he was not smiling now. “He’s got Bertie going to see my friends, man. I assume it wasn’t your doing?”

  “Of course not, sir,” Rupert said quietly. “On the other hand, he agreed we might postpone India, and that’s been positive.” Mr. Waters attempted a smile but it quickly faded.

  “Quite,” the prince said, nodding tightly. “I understand Mr. George is still pushing. Perhaps you might speak with Ned.” He turned back to me. “Maddie, isn’t it?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well, Maddie, it’s wonderful to know I have such a talented correspondent with me. It will come to me, how I know you. I’m sure it will.

  “And now, Helen, perhaps you and I could take some time to work on my remarks for tomorrow.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  He opened the door to his study and she walked through. He followed and closed the door behind them.

  I looked at Mr. Waters, his eyes fixed on the closed door. He looked back at me. “Nothing,” he said, although I hadn
’t asked a question.

  From Autumn Leaves by M. A. Bright

  FRANCE, 1918

  It was a pantomime. She had played an angel, a crow that turns into an angel, from black to white, from a long yellow beak to long golden hair.

  The pantomime was a comedy but that part made him sad, as if she were better as a crow. He didn’t know why.

  It had snowed earlier in the day, and his mind would not rest, not even in the time he spent looking out the window at the large flakes, which fell softly.

  He had come to one of those moments in which life is arrested suddenly, stopped on what had always appeared to be its straight and true road. You might reflect, or not. You might find yourself wanting. You might glimpse another road, a road you might have taken, might still take.

  You might act.

  It was a month since he’d arrived there. The surgeons were saying he needed a further month, perhaps two, to recuperate. He was glad of it.

  But now the prince had found him. It had taken a few weeks, but he’d had a wire that morning, reminding him he’d have to go back to all that, the life he’d been chosen for.

  He was getting stronger every day.

  It wasn’t fear he felt. It was resignation. The life he’d been chosen for.

  * * *

  —

  From the wings, she watched him watching the pantomime. He’d said three times now that he wanted to marry her. She could no longer tell herself he was deluded. He loved her truly, it seemed, and she found herself loving him back.

  * * *

  —