by Mark Helprin
“Fredericka,” the queen began, as dignified as ever, and now warm, “forgive my economy of words, that we received the two of you separately, and that I have used that unfortunate woman to dull by custom what is uncustomarily sharp.”
The queen spoke with such extraordinary gravity that Fredericka said, “What is it, ma’am?” and moved closer.
“I’m dying,” said the queen. “I found out just days ago that I shall probably not live another month. At least that is what they say. It’s a secret. Your father knows, two doctors, the PM, and now you. We’ll have to plan, for much remains to be done. In the short time I have left, I would devote myself to action rather than reflection. What a pity that in thinking of those I love and in taking leave of them, my heart, which was broken long ago, will break again and again in the weeks to come. Freddy doesn’t know. His father will not tell him—cannot tell him. I would like you to do so, and I would like, my dear child, for there to be peace between us.”
Fredericka had many faults and many virtues, but the greatest part of her, that overrode her failings where she had them and surpassed her brilliance where she had it, was her heart. And when the queen, who had closed her eyes briefly at the end of her words, opened them, she saw Fredericka, face contorted beautifully, cheeks and forehead scarlet, tears rolling quietly one after another like raindrops steadily falling from the edge of an eave, and landing amid her now glistening pearls and upon her grey suit, its wool soon mottled with dark spots.
“Don’t cry,” the queen said, as if to a child. “We must prepare Freddy to be king, and, if Craig-Vyvyan will fly, to remain so—with you by his side as his queen.”
In her tears Fredericka was unable to speak. The queen was now assured that this lovely girl understood mortality and knew rank for what it was. This made the queen happy, though her happiness was necessarily subdued. She took Fredericka’s hand. “You must help Freddy,” she said, gently but with unquestionable determination. “Quite soon the world will become very difficult for him. I know, it happened to me. But don’t worry, all will come right in the end.”
WHEN FREDDY SAT DOWN after greeting his father in the study, he expected the conversation to turn to birds, horses, lubricants for carriage wheels, and perhaps even intra-Tory politics.
“How are you?” he was asked.
“Very well,” he answered. He noticed that his father was wearing a rather threadbare suit that he had favoured for decades. It made him look like an academic or a railway worker.
“You’re well?”
“Yes,” Freddy answered. “And how are you? How are things?”
“Things? What things?” The duke assumed the position of a hunting dog.
“Things in general.”
“Oh.”
How distracted he seemed. Freddy thought it was because of his advancing age. He wasn’t young, even if, as he might have said, once he had been. “Everything’s going well, I presume?” Freddy went on.
His father put his hand to his forehead, resting his brow between his right thumb and index finger. “Some dogs ran away,” he said with what seemed to be catastrophic sadness.
“From where?” Freddy asked, taking a huge Cuban cigar from a humidor next to his chair. “I like to pick them up, turn them over, and smell them,” he said.
“Dogs?”
“Cigars. What about the dogs? Did you find them?”
“Yes, we found them.”
“After how long?”
“Five minutes,” the duke said. “Some dogs fled an unlatched gate. They were found near a garden shed.”
“Are you all right?” Freddy asked.
“I’m fine. And you?”
“Splendid,” said Freddy. Neither of them had yet said the word fish, even once.
In an awkward silence, Paul began to drum his fingers upon his desktop with increasing violence until Freddy thought that if the rate of increase held steady his father would become a parody of a drummer in a rock band. But suddenly he stopped, and brightened. “Would you like to see my study?” he asked.
“We’re in your study,” Freddy said, worriedly.
“No no,” said the duke, waving his right hand in dismissal. “This one’s a decoy.”
“A decoy?”
“Yes. You’ve never seen my real study.”
“What about Mummy? Has she seen your real study?”
“No one has, except people who are dead.”
Not knowing what to say, Freddy asked, “Then who keeps it clean?”
“I do.”
“You do?”
Pantomiming, Paul said, “With a mop and a broom. It’s relaxing. I have a stove—it’s off the heating systems—and I myself carry the logs and ashes.”
“You do.”
“Yes.”
“What if something breaks, a window pane, for example?”
“I fix it. I have books. I have putty and glazier’s points. I’ve done it. So as not to attract attention, I send out for the glass under the name of the Duke of Wellington.”
“What do you do there?”
“Nothing much. Come, I’ll show you.” He stood.
“Why now?” Freddy asked.
The duke said, “There’s something I would like to tell you,” and motioned Freddy into the hall.
THEY WALKED to one of the rooms Freddy had usually bypassed throughout his life, a guest chamber for elderly female visitors that was decorated in a repulsive French turn-of-the-century motif. It had neither interesting objects, pleasing proportions, nor attractive views. Boxes for false teeth and pin-cushions had been left behind, and next to a doily-covered chair by the window a stack of magazines awaited anyone interested in feminine crafts, cats, and hideous porcelain figurines.
“I haven’t been in here since the Duchess of Birdwood read me Dr Dolittle stories,” Freddy said. “This isn’t your study, is it?” Because his father was truly a man’s man, stories to the contrary had circulated. Freddy had first been apprised of them by hooligans at his school as they piled on top of him and smashed his face with their fists. Though he had never believed them, he grew nervous when his father put his ear to the door, listened for footsteps in the hall, and turned the lock as quietly as a burglar.
“Of course it isn’t,” Paul said. “I know where you’re going, Frederick, and if I were you I’d put a lid on it.”
“Didn’t Al Jolson stay in this room?” he asked.
“Yes, and so did Colette, Houdini, and Norman Mailer.”
“Not all at the same time, I hope.”
“No,” his father confirmed. “They came in flights of two. I leave the rest to your imagination.”
“But why are we in this room, Pater?” Freddy asked.
“I don’t like it when you call me that. Sit down.” He took out a pipe, filled it, and lit the tobacco. Freddy had loved the scent of his father’s pipe since he could first remember. It calmed him. “What I’m going to tell you, Freddy, is not what I’m going to tell you.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s different.”
“Different,” Freddy asked, “from what?”
“Different from what I’m going to tell you.”
“But you are going to tell me.”
“Yes, but not what I’m going to tell you.”
“I see.”
“When George the Third bought this place it was known as the Queen’s House.”
“Did you say place, or palace?”
“What’s the difference? The point is, it has had a feminine cast since the beginning, probably even when it was a cow pasture. After all, cows are female, are they not?” Freddy looked puzzled, but his father’s rhythm did not break. “George the Third was a down-to-earth fellow who hated royal claptrap. He understood perfectly well however that it was required if he were to rule, as Louis the Fourteenth had understood La Rochefoucauld’s maxim, Il faut usurper la déférence des autres, and built the world’s most luxurious birdcage, into which he lured so he could th
en detain them the nobles who otherwise would have prevented the unification of France. All this nonsense—the gilt, the whorls, the brocade, the huge palaces—as you very well know, serves a powerful political purpose, and always has.”
“Yes.”
“But we have found ways to get away from it, to pretend that we are normal human beings, to feel the friction and texture of life. We have our fishing places, our secret walks in the Highlands, our high altitude parachute jumps over Africa. George the Third had his ways as well. For him, it was the construction of a royal lair, from which Charlotte was barred. Nor, in fact, was anyone else allowed. Since it was built no one has been in it but the kings of England, Prince Albert, your father, and, to keep the knowledge of it alive, the male heirs to the throne, though it is not theirs to use until they are crowned.”
“I’ve been in every room in this palace,” Freddy said.
“No you haven’t.”
“When I was young, I was like water. I seeped into every cranny.”
“Not this one.”
“Since George the Third, no one has been in it but kings and consorts?”
“Yes.”
“How is it maintained?”
“I told you. We maintain it. Because of that, it’s rather rough hewn. We put our initials on everything we build or renovate. Your great-uncle was the best, a natural-born carpenter. I myself installed the stove, to replace a lesser one. I’ve swept the chimney, changed fittings, painted. All supplies and tools have to be spirited up there in the middle of the night. The rumours about me walking through the palace at four in the morning, covered in soot and hauling bags of rubble, are true.”
“Where is it?”
“Above our heads.”
“What does Mummy think about all this?” Freddy asked.
On his way to the wall, Paul said, “Given that she hasn’t seen it, I think she’s a bit jealous, although she puts on that she regards it as an ‘I Hate Girls Club,’ which, of course, it isn’t.”
“You don’t take women there?”
“I don’t take women anywhere, and I don’t take anyone there.”
Freddy assumed that they would leave the guest room and find their way to the lair by some other route, but Paul stood on his toes and extended his right hand to a rosette about seven and a half feet from the floor. The rosette was indistinguishable from those in its row.
“The shorter kings, I assume, had to stand on something. And God help us if this rather complicated mechanism fails. I’m sure I wouldn’t be up to repairing it.”
When Paul turned the rosette it released a weight that pulled up the panel beneath. Revealed was a tiny chamber with one narrow window, like a firing slit, that lit the grey stone. When Freddy was in, his father closed the panel. In front of them was a huge steel door. “You know the key on my watch chain?” his father asked.
“Is that . . . ?”
“It is.”
“You never would tell me what it was for.”
“But I told you that someday I would. You lost interest when you were about five.”
After Paul opened the door, they found themselves at the foot of an iron staircase. Closing the door behind him, he said, “It’s the best eighteenth-century locking mechanism, but insufficient by today’s standards. I haven’t got the wherewithal to install a combination lock, which is what should be here. Perhaps you or your successor will be able to. You could always sponsor a locksmithing school and spend a lot of time hanging about. I thought of that, but was too busy saving and killing hippopotamuses. Albert tried to put in a new lock, I believe, but it was beyond him and he must have turned his energies to the museum instead.”
They advanced up many turns in spiral stairs within a stone shaft lit occasionally by the narrowest of slits. At the top was another steel door. Paul held the key for Freddy to see, even though it was so dark he could hardly make it out. “Here’s the trick,” he said. With his thumb he pushed the rear tooth of the key forward and detached it. “It’s really two keys. When I die, if you haven’t already ascended the throne—in which case I will have given it to you—it will be with me. Ask to be alone with the body. Take it then.”
He put the modified key into the lock of the second door, turned the heavy eighteenth-century tumblers, and opened the way ahead.
FREDDY ENTERED FIRST, head tilted slightly upward, walking slowly so as to take it all in. There is a magic to well proportioned rooms. This one, though perhaps a hundred feet long by sixty feet wide and twenty high, seemed spacious rather than enormous. One of the longest spaces within the palace, it was on the highest floor and hidden by the clever device of blocked windows. Although it had four windows looking out upon London, on the outside were eight, four being windows with only black walls behind them. This scheme was carried on in the adjoining rooms in such a way as to confuse anyone on the outside as to which windows gave out from which rooms. And as this side of the palace was the site of the living quarters, no outside work or scaffolds were permitted without notice, allowing Paul to draw the curtains. As the room on one side of the lair had curtains of cream brocade, so did two of the lair’s windows, and as the room on the other side had curtains of sage brocade, so did the lair’s other two.
“Once,” said Paul, “in fifty-six or fifty-seven, a chap who was cleaning windows poked his squeegee through one of the panes and dropped it. Lots of broken glass, terrible noise. Luckily, I was here. His hand followed, looking for the latch. Just as he had got hold, I grasped his wrist and gave him the squeegee. He never saw beyond the curtain. There was a clatter of boards and then the squeak of ropes moving through pulleys. I stood at the window, unseen, and remember it as if it were yesterday. ‘Bloody hell, Hayfield! Did you see what I saw?’ ‘What are you about, Cliff?’ ‘It’s ’im. The monkey! I’m finished with this floor, lower your end.’ ‘But that’s the queen’s bloody bath.’ ‘Better that than the monkey. He tried to pull me in!’ ”
“Where was Mummy?” Freddy asked.
Suddenly Paul turned away. “You know that Mummy loves you very much. She was at Sandringham. Lucky. She would have been in the bath, and she likes the natural light.” He moved toward the far end of the room. “I’ll start the fire,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “You take a look around.”
“Do you realise,” Freddy asked, “that this is the most beautiful room in the palace?”
“That’s because it’s the simplest,” his father called out, “and because it’s imperfect, having been awkwardly fashioned not by carpenters but kings. It has the inimitable beauty of the simple, the good, and the true. It is redolent with the fact that here the kings of England, for two centuries, could shed the burdens of royalty. Certainly, in their lives, God touched their souls, and where do you think that happened, on gilt thrones frozen by ceremony, or here, where the smoke doesn’t quite draw as well as it should?”
Freddy had always loved the smell of old chimneys—especially in summer when currents of air sometimes sweetened the room unexpectedly. Here, for two hundred years, the smoke had left the life of the forest on every surface. It smelled much like the smoky interior of a stone croft on those islands in the north (where, when Freddy was a child, electricity had not yet come), and the scent carried him back.
The floor was of American heart–pine planks a foot and a half wide, a deep and lustrous auburn, waxed nicely by kings, with ebony-coloured knots, dents, and depressions made by centuries of stray embers that had fallen upon and branded the wood. The most beautiful rugs in the royal family’s possession, of the thickest weaves, in pale red and beige with hints of blue culled from distant sky, were scattered over this floor, and the millwork, decorative moulding, and fluted columns were the colour of parchment. The long interior wall, a hundred feet in extent by twenty high, held a paradise of books—not the brown archaeological relics in the library at Windsor, but books of all stations, in many bright colours, paperbound as well, each of the highest quality.
Seeing Freddy
dazzled by the wall of this gorge, his father said, with delight at divulging the secret, “I read, you know.”
“Where are the dog magazines?”
“Don’t slight dogs, Freddy.”
“I thought that was all you read.”
“Really? Are you so dense as not to realise that I cannot outshine your mother in any way, that I must always follow, that I’m mute for life, confined to a particular image of myself ? Other than in regard to dogs, horses, lion skins, polo, yachts, and game reserves, the mouth is shut forever.”
“You read? You mean, all those Latin and Greek phrases, the Russian and the German, you haven’t just memorised them from a book?”
“Of course not. I know and have read extensively in those languages. I know Japanese, you silly twit.”
“Japanese.”
“I was in one of their prison camps for eighteen months. I would have had to have been a moron not to have learnt the language, wouldn’t you agree? I exist,” said Paul, splitting a fire log with an ancient hatchet, “in two worlds: one that you have known, and, the other, a prisoner’s tight quarters that, nonetheless, open upon the widest spaces of the universe. Though standing still,” he said, sweeping his arm to encompass the twenty thousand volumes, “I am able, like John Dee of Mortlake, to tour the universe and circle the stars.”
Freddy surveyed the room. On the front and back walls were monumental paintings of such beauty and richness of colour that he was stunned. His expression was like that of a soldier who stands alone and unobserved as long columns of a still-armed enemy walk by in retreat: though he showed the joy of his good fortune, he maintained the stillness of a mouse. Above the fireplace was a Raphael, and on the wall opposite, a Bellini.
