by Mark Helprin
THE NEXT MORNING was as hard and bright as the evening of shooting stars had been soft and dark. Windsor Park sits in the midst of England like a jewel. The castle walls stretch on so much like a headland by the sea that it was almost strange not to see white birds sliding on the wind and squawking past vertiginous nests in the battlements.
No matter. At seven-thirty exactly came the noise and excitement of horses streaming from the gate. On two of the noblest horses in England, matched in their deep brown by the dark leather of their tack and the boots of their riders, were the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Belfast, perfectly attired and as used to riding fast as bank clerks are to cashing checks.
When they reached an isolated field, they swept by a stand of polo mallets and picked up what they needed. Freddy, on Napoleon, wheeled around and smashed the ball. This began a breathless ballet the likes of which can be equalled only by wolves in moonlit snow oversailing one another as if they can fly, and turning on the super quick. But these were not wolves moving as deftly as the shine of a needle that flies through soft wool, they were great animals heavy enough to make the ground shake.
In polo skirmishes and long and furious rides through mist, sunlight, and rain, Freddy’s father, a man of remarkable strength and courage who would all his life stand beside his wife as she held sway, spoke to his son as he could not speak in words. Perhaps because he knew the world had been created before words, and because he wanted what he had to say to outlast them, he spoke in the grace of movement that he knew his son would remember indelibly. When they flew across the field at great speed, the father was speaking to the son. When he hit the ball dead centre and it left his mallet like a shot, it was the same. And all throughout, the message was, Here are the movements to follow—now explosive, now smooth, now perfect, now ragged, now abrupt, now surprising, now full of grace—and when I have left the field and these actions are not mine, they will be yours.
Because Paul was aware of what had been said and did not want to be embarrassed in the lull thereafter, he broke off. “Very good; see you at lunch,” he said, and galloped away, leaving Freddy alone on Napoleon amid the trees where he had retreated to leave his mallet.
He walked the horse and listened to the beating of his own heart as it returned to rest. The world for Freddy was full of noted places, of views down corridors and of castles in the field, of particularly beautiful cornices that no one knew except the future king, who loved to see them from a certain angle against deep or brilliant skies. This put him at odds with the architects, because, for him, architecture was neither theory nor experiment, but beauties with which he was a familiar and upon which he was dependent. He had lived all his life amid the great architectural mass of royal Britain. What the theorists had in books and in neck-craning field trips had been his at every moment, dusk and dawn, in privacy, in loneliness, at all hours and in every kind of light, in snow, fog, and pouring rain, when the grey walls in their massive acreage looked like the sea made vertical.
And then came, literally, while Freddy was thinking about architecture, a bolt from the blue, lightning striking from a cloudless morning sky, near enough to bend the limbs of the trees and make the well trained horse sidle and shiver. As Freddy reined in the horse, too busy to survey the surroundings, he thought it might have been a bomb. He galloped out of the copse of trees, ready to race back to the castle in a hail of fire, but there were no volleys, rattles, or bursts.
“Did you hear that?” Freddy asked an old man standing in the middle of a freshly raked patch of bare soil as brown as coffee beans.
“No, but you did.”
Though certainly used to seeing the royal family, the Windsor groundskeepers did not speak with such impertinence. Not only had he not addressed Freddy as “Your Royal Highness,” he hadn’t said “sir,” and he seemed provocatively unimpressed.
Eighty or older, he was straight, strong, and in good health. Too old to have been a gardener, he was dressed in a ratty purple velvet jacket, a shirt with Edwardian collar, striped black trousers, and tennis shoes. He was a Bohemian according to Freddy’s definition of such people, which was that their hair seemed to be in pain. Perhaps he was a relative of someone on the staff, who understood neither the rules of the palace nor that he was speaking to Freddy. But that was unlikely, if only because of his air of authority. The hair, in pain or not, was wild and white, the face ancient and powerful, the posture as straight as if he were wearing a brace.
But then Freddy, who remained mounted, felt some relief, having deduced that this was simply a retired groundskeeper who had returned, as former employees sometimes did, to exercise at former tasks. Freddy had not recognised him, because he would have taken his pension long ago. His clothes were alarming merely because he had been free for decades. He was presumptuous and belligerent because he was saying that these had been his grounds to care for before Freddy had even come into the world, and he wanted Freddy to know it. And the strongest proof of this lay in the fact that he had himself tilled the exquisitely brown patch in which he stood. He had to have, because he stood in the middle, and in the soft and impressionable loam not a footprint was to be seen. Freddy confidently acquainted him with his excellent deductions.
“Oh really?” was the answer. “Where’s my rake?”
“Behind your back,” Freddy said pompously. It had to have been behind his back: the tilled area was large enough so that not even an Olympic javelin thrower could have propelled a rake out of sight.
The pensioner turned around to show that he was rakeless.
“How did you do that?” Freddy asked.
“Do what?”
“Get to the middle of tilled ground while leaving no footprints.”
By this time, the old man was halfway to Freddy, having left a line of footprints deep in the soil. “There,” he said. “I did leave footprints. Always have. Are you calling me a smynk?”
Freddy had never heard the word. “The footprints are only in one direction, out from the centre,” he insisted.
“If you are calling me a smynk, young man, you’ll have hell to pay.”
No one spoke to the Prince of Wales that way except his father, and certainly not retired gardeners. Perhaps he was senile. “I am the Prince of Wales,” Freddy said, to put the man back in his traces.
“You,” the old man said, “are a pipsqueak, a shit bug, and a glothwind. You have rubbed me the wrong way already. You,” he continued, “are an arrogant, snot-eating snail, and you had better pray that I am in a better humour when I meet you, Flip, and the others in St George’s Chapel, on the instant, as fast as you can move your blooming royal arses.”
Needless to say, Freddy was stunned. Never in his life had he heard such talk. In school and in the various branches of the military in which he had served he had been treated with unusual severity, but never, never, had his mother—for God’s sake, the queen—been brought into it. No one had dared.
Aghast and amazed, Freddy knew who it was. “You are Mr . . .” he started to say, but, before he could finish, Mr Neil touched the horse, and as if stabbed with a hat pin the animal rocketed forward completely out of control.
“Do as I say, shit bug!” Freddy heard from behind him.
Usually Freddy could control Napoleon or any other horse. He had ridden all his life, was extremely strong, and totally unafraid. But he could not control this horse, and it did not stop its flight until it was home safe, overturning a dozen buckets and stools and nearly decapitating the Prince of Wales as it entered its stall.
LIMPING AT HIGH SPEED into the family quarters after banging his leg against a post as he ran from the stable, Freddy discovered his mother and father in conversation with Pimcot and Apehand. They were somewhat startled when he rushed in, gimpy, flushed to purple, sweating hard, and with laboured breath, shouting, “He’s here! He’s coming! Into the chapel, into the chapel, all of us! He stabbed Napoleon with a hat pin, and Napoleon almost killed me, damn him!”
The queen k
new from their expressions that her prime minister and the leader of her loyal opposition now believed that every rumour about Freddy was true. She could see them calculating the political repercussions attendant to a flagrantly mad prince.
Before she could intervene, Pimcot and Apehand stood, and Pimcot said, “It’s nice to see Your Royal Highness. How are you, sir?”
But Freddy was so shaken that he ignored them, saying, “I’ve never had any problem with Napoleon, even when he was parted from Josephine. What do you expect, however, if he’s stuck with a hat pin?”
“Who stuck who with a hat pin?” Apehand asked.
“Interesting that you should ask,” Freddy answered. “A mould maker in a rubber sex toy factory in Naples, that’s who, a nonagenarian in a purple velvet jacket and Edwardian collar, a perfectly vile creature, that’s who.”
“It is he,” the queen pronounced. “What did he say?”
“He said to get your royal arses to St George’s Chapel as fast as you could. Can you believe the impertinence, the gall?”
But as Freddy was complaining, the queen was already rushing out the door. He had never seen her run. Neither Pimcot nor Apehand had ever seen her run. Her husband had never seen her run. No one had ever seen her run. She had never run. Now she was running, and she loved it. “Get Fredericka, too!” she shrieked like someone being tickled. “I love this! It feels so good! I’m going to do it every day!”
The guards on duty watched the queen run through the inner court and shriek with apparent joy, followed by Paul, a limping Prince of Wales, the prime minister, a heavily panting Apehand, and Fredericka, in a sun dress, clutching her hat.
“What do you think this might be?” asked one Royal Marine of another.
“Obviously, what Freddy has is catching.”
“It’s too bad we don’t have a video camera. Psnake would pay a million quid.”
“Well look at him,” said the other guard, pointing at a fusilier on the roof, who was carefully filming the scene. “His ship’s just come in.”
The chapel door was locked, but the queen produced a key from out of her handbag as if she had known that she someday would need it in a pinch. When they were all in, clumped near the entrance, she closed the door and locked it from the inside.
“How will Mr Neil get in?” Freddy asked in the tones of a Roman conspirator. They felt strange in the vast chapel, which was colder than the outside, perfectly silent, and dark but for the light filtering in agelessly through coloured glass.
“He’s already in,” the queen told him, although no one could see him.
“But how can that be? The door was locked.”
They walked forward, and as their eyes adjusted they saw—in rose, blue, and yellow light that flowed as if through reefloads of translucent water and gaily coloured fish; beneath heavy, straight, and parti-coloured flags; between multiple banks of yellow-lacquered choir stalls; upon the grave of Henry VIII and Charles I; and amid the blue and white tiles set in the floor of the airy and towering vault—a man. He stood as if floating in blue light, his white hair almost glowing, his purple jacket as shiny and mysterious as the skin of an aubergine, which knows not whether it is purple, blue, or black. His eyebrows stood out, at a hundred feet, better than the most clubulous aristocratic colonel’s. As he breathed, light seemed to ebb and flow around him like water against a rocky coast. The room was charged with a presence, and it had no relation to the queen. Nor was it due to any of her family or the prime minister, and certainly it was not on Apehand’s account. This candle was lit by Mr Neil, whoever he was, and burned with an exciting brightness that Freddy hoped might make things right.
Even were it not good news that he would glean from whatever was to happen here, at least Freddy might be freed from waiting powerlessly in royal suspended animation. The prospect of resolution was for him like coming out of an airless tunnel onto high cliffs above a bright June sea. His sense and courage seemed to flood back as if from nowhere, making him ashamed of all the foolish things he had done. Just a moment before, he had burst into the family quarters like a lunatic, speaking words that might be misconstrued, sounding too eager and very likely insane.
The first impulse that overtook him was to counter the power of Mr Neil. His parents, Pimcot, Apehand, and even Fredericka might fall under the spell of this person, this Rasputin, but he, Freddy, would not. Freddy, who supposedly was insane, would be the rock of sanity, the sceptic, the Holmesian barrister. Whoever Mr Neil was, he was undoubtedly a fraud of the type that takes advantage of beleaguered and declining aristocracy. People like that were exceedingly dangerous.
Freddy watched as his mother, Philippa, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, approached the man who stood upon the grave of her ancestors Henry VIII and Charles I. He did not bow, and he certainly did not address her properly. “Hello, Flip,” he said, “haven’t seen you since you were a tot.”
“Hello, Flip?” Freddy said to himself, with no sound, his eyes darting and wandering, his brows knit into a puggle.
“I’ve seen your picture in the newspapers, but that’s not the same. You were a pretty girl with a sweet face, and now you’re a handsome woman with a sweet face.”
Freddy waited for the upbraiding that was sure to come on the heels of such ripe familiarity, but rather than that he witnessed the unthinkable. His mother looked down demurely, closed her eyes like a bashful schoolgirl, and curtsied.
She what? She curtsied, deeply. To whom? To an insolent mould maker in a Neapolitan rubber sex toy factory? And then he put his arm around her shoulders and led her, as if she were star-struck, to a place in the front stall that was not even hers, and in which she, the queen of England, obediently took a seat.
Mr Neil merely pointed at the other seats in the same row where he wanted everyone present to sit, and they went there like zombies. Freddy didn’t like this at all, and remained standing.
“Sit there,” Mr Neil said offhandedly, pointing at the last unoccupied place.
“Thank you, I’ll stand,” Freddy announced, his anger apparent.
Mr Neil froze, like a perfectly still stalk of Aurorians bucra, or an ancient bubble trapped in stone.
“Freddy, sit where he tells you,” his father ordered.
“Freddy!” the queen seconded.
Mr Neil slowly lifted his left foot from ground that was the grave of two kings, until he was standing like an old stork.
Freddy was undeterred. “I am the Prince of Wales,” he declared. “Who are you?”
“I am Mr Neil. Who are you?”
“I just told you.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“You are me?”
“No,” said Freddy. “I am not you. You are you, and I am I, and I am the Prince of Wales.”
“I know that song!” Mr Neil exclaimed. “I used to sing it in the navy.” And then, bursting with energy as if he were in a music hall before five thousand people, he sang.
Oh, I am not you, pass me the stew,
In the navy they serve it in pails,
You are you, and I am I,
And I am the Prince of Wales!
Oh, I am not you, the ship’s built with glue,
You’d best never lean on the rails,
For you are you, and I am I,
And I am the Prince of Wales!
“Will you shut up,” Freddy said.
“Yes, I will. Do you know why? Because you are the Prince of Wales. You are the Prince of Wales! You! You are! You are the Prince! Of Wales!” Mr Neil proclaimed. “Well. My oh my. The Prince of Wales himself.”
Freddy was immobile. He might not force Mr Neil into anything, but then again neither could Mr Neil force him.
“I am standing on the grave of two great kings, my boy,” Mr Neil said. (Freddy could not place his accent, which was, perhaps, a fusion of Welsh and
Cornish.) “Hank and Chuck. Compared to them, you are nothing but a bad pup. Whereas you have yet to accomplish anything, they were kings who made of kingliness something more when they finished with it than what it was when they began.”
“And what of it?”
“Undoubtedly you know that one of Chuck’s vertebrae was made into a salt cellar, and that a finger bone of Hank the Eighth is now the handle of a cheese knife.”
“I thought it was a dessert knife,” Freddy said, happy to catch Mr Neil.
“Cheese,” said Mr Neil, “which is often a dessert. But you see, Prince Goat Vomit, even if you are lucky—that is, lucky to be alive after provoking me, lucky to live until you can be king, lucky to become king, and lucky to be great—even if you are lucky enough and good enough to pass the tests and to last on, you are still nothing more than goat vomit whose more stolid substance should be flattered to serve as a salt cellar or a cheese knife.”
“And what about you?” Freddy asked, contemptuously. “I picture you eventually as a bowl brush, or perhaps the ivory button on a sex toy.”
“They don’t have ivory buttons.”
“Yes, and you should know, shouldn’t you. We’re all mortal and have the same end. I have no illusions to the contrary. Even if I did, it wouldn’t excuse you from proper conduct in my regard, or, for that matter, in anyone’s regard.”
No one said anything, not even Mr Neil, but the queen and Prince Paul looked at Freddy in a way that confidently contradicted him.
“Excuse me?” he asked of his parents. “He’s not mortal? He won’t die?”
They kept their expressions fixed exactly where they had been.
“Oh no,” said Freddy. “What rubbish. You mean to say that you think this old loon is immortal? What can he have done to you? This is the twentieth century, is it not?”
