Thirteen

His father was at breakfast.

That was the first thing about the second of May. Frederick came down the stairs of the north wing at seven, not to Bridget’s kitchen, because on his birthday breakfast was in the small dining room, and had been every year since he was five; and he went in, and his mother was at the end of the long table by the fire, as she always was, in her dressing gown, with her coffee; and at the other end of the table, at the far end, in the chair nobody used, in the grey cardigan, with the newspapers folded beside his plate and his stick leaning against the table, was his father.

Frederick stopped in the doorway.

He had known. Of course he had known. His father had flown in last night from New York, at nine, on his own aircraft, and landed at eleven, and come to the Palace in the dark, and Frederick had heard the car on the gravel from his bed under the wall map and the north wing door, and his father’s stick on the stone of the passage, slowly, and Castellanos’s voice, low, and the stairs. He had known his father was in the house. He had not known that he would be at breakfast. His father did not come to breakfast. In London his father had breakfast at six, alone, in the study, with the boxes, and had done since 1972.

“Good morning,” said his father, from the far end of the table.

“Good morning.”

“Many happy returns.” His father looked at him down the length of the table, over his reading glasses. “Of the whole.”

His mother put down her coffee.

She looked at Frederick in the doorway, and at his father at the far end of the table, and she stood up, in her dressing gown, and put her hands together, and sang.

She sang the Swedish one. Ja, må han leva. The one she sang every year at this table on this morning, once, in the clear, small, perfectly true voice she used for that and for hymns; faster than the English one, with the hurra at the end four times. She had sung it every second of May since he could remember. She had never once sung it with his father in the room.

And at the far end of the table his father did not sing. His father did not know the words, or the tune, or Swedish, beyond the eleven words of it he had learned in 2008 to say to her mother at a dinner and had never used again. He sat in the chair at the far end in the grey cardigan with his hands flat on the table and listened, with his eyes on his wife, the whole way through, to the end, to the fourth hurra, which she sang alone, quite loudly, into the silence, and then stopped, and went pink.

And then his father said, quietly, from the far end of the table, in English:

“Hurra.”

His mother sat down very suddenly and picked up her coffee and looked at it.

“Sit down, Frederick,” said his father. “Your egg is getting cold. Bridget sent it up herself. She stood in that doorway with it for some time before she came in, and then she came in, and put it down, and looked at me, and said Your Majesty in a voice I have not heard since my nanny in 1952, and went.” He unfolded a newspaper. “I gather that I am in her kitchen’s way.”

---

The photograph was at ten, in the library, in front of the same books.

It had been at ten every second of May since he was a baby. The Household’s photographer came, a quiet grey-haired man called Mr Selby who had taken the photograph every year for thirteen years and had taken his father’s, in London, for thirty before that; and set up his camera on its tripod in the library of the north wing, in front of the tall shelves on the east wall, the ones with the Charter commentaries and the bound Hansards in red; and Frederick stood in front of them, in a suit, in the same place, on the same square of the carpet, which had a small worn patch in it now from thirteen years of standing; and Mr Selby looked at him through the camera, and took it.

If you put them side by side you could watch him grow up in front of the same books. His mother had them all, in a book of her own, in a drawer in her sitting room, with the school reports.

“Just as you are, sir,” said Mr Selby, through the camera.

Frederick stood on the worn patch and looked at the camera.

He knew what to do. He had done it thirteen times. You looked at the camera, and you did nothing with your face, because anything you did with your face would be in fourteen capacities’ newspapers on Monday with an opinion attached; and the photograph would show a boy in front of some books looking at a camera with nothing on his face at all, as every one of them did, all thirteen, so that his mother’s book was a book of a boy getting taller and doing nothing.

He looked at the camera.

He thought about a stool in a gym in September, and a tired man in a cardigan saying just a normal face, son, and himself not having one.

He thought about a pass, on a green cord, with a photograph on it of a boy who looked about nine, as though somebody had just told him the price of something.

He thought about a man on a desert island with one palm tree, on the comics page, round a bus pass.

He thought about Douglas.

The light went off.

Mr Selby looked at the small screen on the back of the camera. He looked at it for some time. Then he looked over the top of the camera, at Frederick, standing on the worn patch in front of the Charter commentaries and the bound Hansards, with an expression on his face that Frederick did not know he had.

“Sir,” said Mr Selby. “Would you like to see?”

Frederick had never been asked whether he would like to see. Not in thirteen years. He went round the tripod and looked at the small screen.

It was a boy in a suit in front of some books. He was taller than last year. His hair was flat on one side where his mother had flattened it at breakfast and it had decided to stay. And he was not doing nothing with his face. He was doing something. Not much. At the corner of his mouth, on the left, very slightly, something had started and been stopped, and been caught by the camera halfway, in the act of being stopped; so that the boy in front of the books looked, in the photograph, exactly like a boy who has just thought of something extremely funny in church.

“That’s the one, sir,” said Mr Selby quietly. “If you’ll allow it.”

Frederick looked at it for a long time.

“Will it go in the newspapers?”

“It goes where it always goes, sir. To the Household. And then to your mother. And then, if the Household releases it, to the papers.” Mr Selby looked at the screen. “The Household will want to know whether you’d prefer another.”

Frederick thought about it. He thought about fourteen capacities’ newspapers on Monday with an opinion attached.

“No,” he said. “That one.”

---

They played the game at lunch, across the table.

It was in the small dining room, at the end by the fire, the three of them; his mother at the end, his father on her right, Frederick on her left, so that he and his father were across the table from each other for the first time in his life at a meal that was not an occasion; and Bridget’s princess cake was waiting on the sideboard under a glass cover, green marzipan, with a pink rose on top, as it had been every year; and in the middle of the fish his father put down his knife and fork and said:

“An Act of the Parliament of New Wessex.”

Frederick looked up.

“Reforming its Upper House,” said his father. “Which has resisted, which Upper Houses do, and has now been persuaded, after eleven hundred pages and an election, to accept a reduction of its delaying power from two years to one. Passed at Sydney on Thursday.” He picked up his fork again. “In right of which Crown?”

“New Wessex,” said Frederick.

“Good.”

“It’s too easy. You always give me easy ones on my birthday.”

“I always give you easy ones on your birthday,” said his father, “because on your birthday I am at the end of a telephone and cannot see your face, and I should like you to have one thing on the day that you get right.” He ate a piece of fish. “Today I can see your face. You may have a hard one back.”

Frederick put down his fork.

He had one. He had been working on it since Wednesday, as he always did; not as hard as usual, because of New York, but he had one; and he had not thought that he would ever ask it across a table, to his father’s face, in the small dining room, with the princess cake on the sideboard and his mother watching.

“A Bill,” he said, “introduced at Ottawa…”

His father stopped eating.

It was very slight. Frederick nearly did not see it. His father’s fork stopped, for about a second, halfway to his mouth, and then went on.

“…in the Parliament of New Albion,” said Frederick, “to provide that any subject of another realm of the union who crosses the frontier into New Albion as the guest of a resident of New Albion, for a period of not more than one week, for the purpose of a holiday, may do so on any document issued by his own realm showing his name and his date of birth, without a passport, so long as he is under the age of sixteen and accompanied by the resident.” He took a breath. “And the resident is the King. Who lives in New Albion every summer at Lac du Roi, by a gift of the Albian people in 1972, but who is not, in the law of New Albion, ordinarily resident there, because his ordinary residence is in London. So is he a resident, for the purposes of the Bill, or not?” He paused. “In right of which Crown is it assented to? And can the King assent to a Bill that might be about him?”

There was a silence at the end of the table by the fire.

His mother had put down her knife and fork. She was looking at his father.

His father was looking at Frederick across the table. He was not eating. He had put his fork down on his plate, very carefully, and his hands were flat on the table on either side of it, and he was looking at his son with an expression that Frederick had never seen on his face at the other end of a telephone, because you could not see faces on a telephone; it was the expression, Frederick thought, of a man who has been set a very good question and is deciding, at the same time, whether he is more proud of it or more annoyed.

“New Albion,” said his father, at last, slowly. “In right of New Albion. By the Governor-General of New Albion, in my name, on the advice of my New Albian ministers, who would be bound to advise me on whether a Bill touching my own residence engaged my personal interest, and who would, I think, advise me to leave the assent to the Governor-General entirely and not inquire.” A pause. “Which I would.”

“And is he a resident?”

His father looked at him for a long time.

“That,” he said, “is a question for the courts of New Albion. Who would, I suspect, after eleven hundred pages and an election, decide that he was not.” He picked up his fork. “Which means the Bill would not help the boy from Milwaukee in the least, and he will still need a passport, from the Post Office, in a queue.” He ate a piece of fish. “Which you knew. Which is why you asked it.”

Frederick looked at his plate.

“You set that Bill,” said his father, “to see whether I would find a way round the passport.”

“Yes.”

“I have not.”

“No.”

“Good,” said his father, and ate his fish; and at the end of the table, his mother picked up her knife and fork again, and Frederick saw her shoulders move, once, and be stopped.

---

The parcel came at three.

It was not from the Household. It came by the ordinary post, which came on Saturdays, to the north wing door, where Castellanos signed for it; a brown cardboard package, quite heavy, the size of a large book, addressed in a careful upright hand he did not know to Prince Frederick, Columbia Palace, New Westminster, with a stamp on it from Maryland, and a postmark that said BALTIMORE; and Castellanos brought it to the small sitting room himself, and put it on the table under the window, and stood back, and did not go.

“It’s been looked at, sir,” he said. “By the post room. It’s what it says it is.”

“What does it say it is?”

“A book,” said Castellanos. “From a shop in Baltimore.”

Frederick opened it.

He opened it carefully, because it had been wrapped carefully, in brown paper inside the cardboard, and tissue paper inside the brown paper; and inside the tissue paper there was a book.

It was a large, thin book, in a grey cloth cover, rather worn at the corners, with the title stamped on the front in faded black. Signal Boxes of the Mid-Atlantic. And under it, smaller, 1988.

He sat at the table under the window and looked at it.

There had been four hundred printed. The library at the Palace had one, which was where he had read it, twice, in an armchair, and which he could not take away because it was the library’s. There was one, the signalman with the hat had said, that his wife had, and one that his mother had had. And this one. From a shop in Baltimore.

He opened it.

On the inside of the cover, on the flyleaf, in a careful upright hand, in blue ink, somebody had written:

For the lad who pulled 17.

This is my mother’s copy. She would have wanted it read. The box is still there if you ever want it. Nights are best. Nobody bothers you.

R. Castle, Signalman Havre de Grace Junction Box

And under that, in a different hand, smaller, older, in fountain pen, in black, so faint he had to hold it to the window, a hand he knew better than any other hand in the world:

Obtained by way of a bookseller in Baltimore, on inquiry, without the use of any office of any Crown. With love, on your thirteenth birthday. Papa.

He sat at the table under the window in the small sitting room with the book open on his knees and could not say anything at all.

Behind him, by the door, Castellanos had not gone. He was standing with his hands folded, looking at the window, at the Axis beyond it, and the white buildings at the end of it in the May sunshine, and the trees along the middle of it, which had come into leaf that week, all at once, as they did.

“Sergeant Castellanos,” said Frederick, after a long time, without turning round.

“Sir.”

“How did he find him? The signalman?”

Castellanos looked at the window.

“He asked me, sir,” he said. “On Monday the twentieth of April. By telephone. From London.” A pause. “He asked me whether I knew the name of the signalman at the careers day at Ellicott. The one with the hat. I said I didn’t, but I could find out, from the school, which would have the names of everybody who’d come. He said no.” Another pause. “He said, Sergeant, I do not want the school asked, or the Household, or anybody whose job it is. I want you to go and stand at the AmRail desk at Union Station on your day off, as a man who likes trains, and ask who works the box at Havre de Grace.” Castellanos looked at the window. “So I did. On the Wednesday. On my day off. They told me. And I told him.”

Frederick sat with the book.

“He said,” said Castellanos, “to tell you, if you asked, that it was the only time in fifty-four years he has asked a protection officer to go and stand at a railway station on his day off, and that he was very sorry about it, and that he would do it again.” He looked at the floor. “And that the signalman’s name is Robert, and that he has a wife called Doreen who has the other copy, and that he would like you to write and thank him. Yourself. By post.”

“Second class?”

Castellanos looked at him in the reflection in the window.

“I’d say first, sir,” he said. “For a signalman.”

---

At four his father went down to the kitchen.

Frederick did not know he was going to. Nobody did. He was in the small sitting room with the book on his knees, reading page four for the third time, the page with the forty-eight levers and the diagram of the junction, when he heard the stick on the stairs, going down, not up; down the back stairs, slowly, one at a time, the way Castellanos took them; towards the basement, and the long passage, and the kitchen with the range.

He went after him. He did not know why. He went down the back stairs in his socks, because he had taken his shoes off in the small sitting room without thinking, the way you did at flat sixteen, and stood at the bottom, at the door of Bridget’s kitchen.

His father was standing in the middle of it.

He was standing on the stone floor in the grey cardigan with the stick, in Bridget’s kitchen, in front of the long scrubbed table by the range, with the copper pans on the wall and the window high up at the level of the gravel, and the dumbwaiter in the corner; and Bridget was at the range with her back very straight and a wooden spoon in her hand and an expression on her face of total, rigid, scandalised panic; and his father was not looking at Bridget.

He was looking at the refrigerator.

At the big silver refrigerator by the door, the size of a wardrobe, which had nothing on its doors at all, except, on the right-hand door, at the height of Bridget’s eyes, a small yellow rubber magnet in the shape of a wedge of cheese, from the Wisconsin Dells, holding a sheet of paper torn from a pad, with three words on it in round blue writing.

EAT THE SANDWICH

His father looked at it for a long time.

“Bridget,” he said.

“Your Majesty.”

“What is this?”

Bridget looked at the refrigerator. Her face went through a number of things, very fast, the way the mathematics teacher’s had gone through Your Ro in September.

“It’s a cheese, sir,” she said. “A magnet. Master Hartigan gave it to the Prince. For Christmas. Four pounds ninety-nine. It’s the same as theirs. On their fridge. Holding up the Prince’s…” She stopped. “Holding up some things of the Prince’s, sir. So the Prince asked could he put it on mine. And I said yes.” She looked at the spoon in her hand. “And then I needed something for it to hold up. So I wrote that.” She looked at the floor. “It’s what I write on his sandwiches. Every day. Since September.”

His father looked at the cheese. And at the paper. EAT THE SANDWICH.

“Does he?” he said.

“Every day, sir. Theo watches.”

His father was silent for a moment.

Then he turned round, slowly, on the stick, and looked at the long scrubbed table by the range; at the chair nearest the range, which had been Frederick’s since he was four; and the one beside it, which had been Theo’s for one afternoon, in November.

“Bridget,” he said. “May I have one?”

Bridget stared at him.

“A sandwich, sir?”

“If it is not too much trouble.” His father pulled out the chair beside Frederick’s, the one that had been Theo’s, and sat down in it, slowly, with the stick against the table, at the long scrubbed table in the basement kitchen of Columbia Palace, in the grey cardigan, on his son’s thirteenth birthday. “I have had a great many lunches in seventy-nine years, Bridget. I have never had a sandwich I was told to eat.” He looked at her. “And I should like to know what all the fuss is about.”

Bridget looked at him for a long moment, with the spoon.

Then she put the spoon down, and went to the larder, and came back with bread and ham and mustard, and made a sandwich, very fast, at the counter, with her back to him, and cut it into four triangles, and cut the crusts off; and put it on a plate, and put the plate on the scrubbed table in front of the King; and then, after a moment, went to the pad by the range, and tore off a sheet, and wrote on it in her round blue writing, and put it on the plate beside the sandwich, folded small.

His father unfolded it.

He read it. He did not say anything. He folded it again and put it in the pocket of the grey cardigan, and picked up the first triangle, and ate it.

Frederick, in the doorway, in his socks, could not see what it said.

He saw Bridget’s face, though, at the range, with her back very straight and the wooden spoon in her hand again; and he thought he knew.

---

“Wednesday the third of June,” said his father, at six, in the small sitting room, by the fire, with the book on Frederick’s knees and the stick across his own. “Dame Margaret has found it. I shall be here from the first. On the Wednesday he may come after school, at four, for tea, if his parents allow it. I shall write to them first, to ask whether he may come to tea. And then, if they allow it, and he comes, and I have met him, I shall write to them again. About August.” He looked at the fire. “Two letters. In my own hand. In that order.”

“Two?”

“A man does not ask for a week before he has asked for an hour,” said his father. “Or he should not.”

Frederick looked at the fire.

“What if he doesn’t want to come? To tea?”

His father thought about this, honestly, the way he thought about everything, in order.

“Then he will not come,” he said. “And I shall write about August anyway, without having met him, and his parents will decide, and I shall abide by it.” He turned his head and looked at Frederick by the fire, with the book on his knees, Signal Boxes of the Mid-Atlantic, 1988. “But I do not think, from what I have been told, that he is a boy who says no to tea.”

---

On Monday, on the wall, at ten to eight, in the May sunshine, Theo gave him a box.

It was a small box, battered, blue, the size of a pack of cards, because it was a pack of cards; and it was wrapped in the comics page, with a great deal of sellotape, with a dog in a hat on the front.

“Kate wrapped it,” said Theo. “She’s speaking to me. She says she’ll stop if you don’t like it.” He got out his apple. “Four pounds eighty. Twenty pence change. I’ve got it.” He produced it. Two ten-pence pieces. He put them on the wall between them. “Happy birthday. Thirteen. Same as me in August.”

Frederick opened it.

Thirty-two cards. Acorns, and leaves, and hearts, and bells. A pig on the ace. Men with moustaches and feathers in their hats, and one of them, the king of bells, with a face exactly like Mr Gamage of the Legion.

“So you can practise,” said Theo. “At yours. With your mum. Or your man.” He bit his apple. “Kate says she wants a rematch. On a Friday. She says she’s going to beat you twelve times, and then she’s going to lie on the floor again, and this time she’s going to stay there.” He chewed. “She says gell.”

Frederick held the cards.

He thought about a book in a grey cloth cover, with an inscription from a box at Havre de Grace; and a sandwich cut into four triangles with the crusts off, on a plate on a scrubbed table in front of a King, with a note beside it; and a photograph of a boy in front of some books who looked, for once, like a boy who had thought of something funny in church.

“Theo,” he said.

“What.”

“My father’s coming. In June. The first week.” He looked at the cards. “He wants to meet you. On Wednesday the third. At four. For tea. He’s going to write to your mum and dad. First. To ask if you can.”

Theo stopped chewing.

He sat on the wall in the May sunshine with the apple in his hand and his mouth full and looked at Frederick for about three seconds, steadily, the way he had looked at the flagstaff and the wall map; taking it in.

Then he swallowed.

“Your dad,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Wants to meet me.”

“Yes.”

“For tea.”

“Yes.”

Theo looked across the yard at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, where Castellanos was sitting with his coffee in the sunshine, looking at the yard; and lifted his hand; and the finger came up off the cup.

“Huh,” said Theo.

He did not ask why. He did not ask what for. He did not ask what the King was like, or whether he should bow, or what he should call him, or what he should wear, or anything at all about the Crown, the way he had never asked anything about it, not once, all year. He sat on the wall and ate his apple, right round, in a spiral, slowly, and then the bottom of the core; and put the core in his pocket; and picked up the two ten-pence pieces off the wall, and looked at them, and put them in Frederick’s hand, and closed Frederick’s fingers over them.

“Mum’ll want to know what he eats,” he said.