The Letter

The letter was in the front pocket.

Sam took it out at a quarter to seven at his desk in 316, before the box: a long envelope, cream, heavy, with three small crowns embossed in the corner and nothing else on the front but a line of typing.

Till Hans Kungliga Höghet Kronprinsen.

“Front pocket,” said Sam. “The box is in the main part.” He put the envelope down on the far side of the desk, away from the red box, with about a foot of desk between them, and looked at the foot with satisfaction. “Separate capacity.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Across the road.” Sam unlocked the box. “A man from the Swedish embassy flew in last night with it in a case. He came to the front door of the hall at nine and asked for you.” He turned the key the right way for Frederick’s hand. “The day porter sent him across the road.”

“How did she know to?”

“The sergeant gave her a card in August,” said Sam. “For anybody who asks for you. It just says across the road.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them. “The sergeant signed for it. He wanted to give it to you himself. She said no deliveries.”

On the end of Sam’s bed, in a grey sweatshirt, with a towel over his shoulder and his hair wet, Rhys was looking at the envelope the way a man in a gallery looks at the one painting he has come for.

“Is that from the government?” said Rhys.

“Yes.”

“The Swedish government.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t read it,” said Rhys at once. “I’d just like to look at the letterhead, sir. If it’s got one.” He swallowed. “For my own interest.”

“Box first,” said Frederick, and sat down in Sam’s chair.

---

He did the box. It took twenty minutes. There was a warrant, and a letter about a lighthouse, and the draft of a speech for the Governor-General that somebody wanted him to see and not to change, and he initialled each, small, in pencil, in the top right-hand corner, with the cream envelope lying a foot away on the far side of the desk with its three crowns and its line of typing, not looking at him.

Then he closed the box, and turned the key, and gave it to Sam, who put it in the backpack; and only then did he reach across the foot of desk for the envelope.

Rhys, on the end of the bed, had stopped breathing again.

“It’s in Swedish,” said Frederick.

“I know, sir. I’d still like to see it.”

It was one page. Typed, on paper as heavy as the envelope, with the three crowns at the head and under them, small, Statsministern, and at the foot a signature in blue ink that went uphill, the signature of a man who signed a great many things standing up.

Your Royal Highness,

He stopped there, at the first line, and read it again.

“What?” said Rhys.

“Royal Highness.” He looked at it. “In Sweden I’m Crown Prince. He wears the style of the place he stands in. I mean I do.”

“So he’s…”

“It’s the last one,” said Frederick. “The last letter I’ll ever get that says Royal Highness.”

Sam, at the window with the backpack on his knee, took out the notebook and wrote something, and Frederick did not need to look; it would be the number of days.

He read the rest to himself.

The Government has considered the Crown Prince’s Course, published by the Court in 2026, in the light of Her Majesty’s address of 9 January.

The Course was written for a Crown Prince. After 1 February there will not be one. The Government has therefore withdrawn its concurrence in the Course and has informed the Court that it will not ask for it again, in this form or in any other.

The Government will make no request of Your Royal Highness concerning residence or study, this year or in any of the four. It gives way, entirely, and would rather say so plainly than have it discovered later in a footnote.

I will be honest with Your Royal Highness, because Her Majesty has spent three years teaching me to be. If Her Majesty had not said what she said on Monday the ninth, I would have asked you to come to Uppsala. I would have asked carefully and often, and I would have been right to ask. After Monday the ninth nobody in Stockholm can ask, and I should not like to be the first to try.

The Marshal of the Realm has asked me to say that he understands entirely.

Kalmar nation has asked me to say that its place is kept. I have told it that I would pass that on, and that it was not a condition. It is not a condition.

The Government would be glad to see Your Majesty in Stockholm in the summer, at a time convenient to you. That is a request and not a condition either. I have looked up Tempe. It is at thirty-three degrees north, and the Government has no view on the heat.

Anders Holmqvist

And under the signature, in the same blue ink, in a small square hand that had written a great many things on a blackboard:

P.S. Her Majesty has not seen this letter. She told me on Tuesday that it was not hers to see. I mention it because she would not.

---

He put it down on the desk.

“Well?” said Rhys, and then, hearing himself, “sir.”

“They’ve given in.”

Rhys looked at him.

“Entirely,” said Frederick. “He says entirely. The Course is withdrawn. They won’t ask for Uppsala. They won’t ask about where I live. Not now, not after.” He looked at the page. “Four years.”

“Can they do that? Without the Riksdag?”

“There’s nothing to do. It was never law. It was a plan.” He heard himself say it and knew whose sentence it was: the Register’s, about his mother’s Court, in the article he had read at fourteen under a blanket. A plan and not a residence. “You just stop having it.”

Rhys sat on the end of the bed with the towel on his shoulder and thought about this, with the expression of a political scientist watching a constitution do something it had not been taught.

“Then you can stay,” he said.

“I was always staying.”

“Yes, sir.” Rhys looked at the envelope with the three crowns. “But now nobody’s asking.”

Sam did not say anything. He was looking at the letter on the desk, at the place where it lay, a foot from where the box had been; and then he got up and went to the shelf over his bed, where his textbooks were in order of size, and took down a folder he had evidently bought for the purpose and kept there against it. It was a plain card folder, blue, from the campus bookshop, with the price still on it.

“Two pounds forty,” said Sam, and held it out. “For the other one.”

Frederick took it.

“I’ve got a question,” said Sam.

“Yes?”

“The box,” said Sam. He looked at the backpack on his knee, with the red box in it and the zip that went halfway. “In February. From Sweden. I asked you at Christmas, and I’ve still got the colour down as a question, and now I need the size as well.”

“I still don’t know,” said Frederick. “Ask the sergeant.”

“I will,” said Sam, and wrote it down.

Rhys leaned forward, very slightly, from the end of the bed.

“Sir,” he said. “The letterhead.”

Frederick turned the page round on the desk so that the three crowns faced him, and Rhys looked at them for a long time without touching anything, the way his father had probably looked at his first warrant card, and then sat back and said, “Thank you, sir,” in a voice of great formality, and went to iron a shirt.

---

The Swedish republicans were having the best month they had had in living memory, and Rhys had found the graph.

He showed it to them at lunch in the dining hall on his laptop, between the trays: the membership of the Republican Association since 1974, a long flat grey line that wandered along the bottom of the screen for sixty years like a man looking for his keys, and then, in the last week, stood up and went straight into the air.

“Eleven thousand,” said Rhys. “Since the ninth. They had forty thousand in 2028.” He scrolled. “The chairwoman was on the television four times on Sunday. She used to be a teacher. She says a King who lives in Arizona proves their whole case.”

“Does it?” said Sam.

“She says that if Sweden can do without him for four years, it can do without him for ever.” Rhys considered this with deep professional pleasure. “It’s quite a good argument, sir.”

“It’s a very good argument,” said Frederick.

“What’s the answer?”

Frederick thought about the postscript, and about a sentence in the letter that had not said anything about the Republican Association at all, and had said it very clearly.

“It’s not the government’s job to answer it,” he said.

“Whose is it?”

“Mine. Eventually.” He ate a chip. “Not this month.”

They had Expressen on Sam’s telephone, propped against the salt: his own face again, from October, the maroon arms, and over it two words in the heavy black capitals the paper kept for wars and royal weddings. KUNGEN I ÖKNEN. The King in the desert. And Aftonbladet, which had found the university’s housing pages and printed, across half a page, a plan of a typical double room in a first-year hall, with two beds, two desks, a wardrobe and a plant, all labelled in Swedish in a neat sans serif with arrows.

Tyler, who had discovered meals on the ninth and was now on a schedule, leaned over and looked at it.

“Is that our room?”

“It’s a room. From the website.”

“What does that say?” Tyler pointed at an arrow, and a bed, and a word.

“Kungens säng,” said Frederick. “The King’s bed.”

Tyler looked at it. The bed with the arrow was by the window.

“That’s my bed,” said Tyler.

“I know.”

“They gave you the window.” He looked at the plan with mounting outrage, and at the other bed, by the door, which had an arrow of its own. “What’s that one say?”

“Rumskamraten,” said Frederick. “Amerikan.” He looked at it. “The roommate. American.”

“That’s it? That’s all it says?”

“That’s all they know.”

Tyler sat back.

“That’s all you knew,” said Sam, not looking up from his eggs. “For five months.”

Tyler opened his mouth, and thought about it, and shut it, and looked at the plan again for some time with an expression of wounded dignity, the expression of a man who got to a room first in August and has just seen it given away in a foreign newspaper.

“I got there first,” he said.

---

His mother rang a little before one, which was eight in the evening in London, and he took it on the step.

He came in from lunch and went up the stairs and sat down on the third step from the landing between the second floor and the third, under the narrow window, with the window open an inch and the car park beyond it, and the black bird with the long tail walking about on the tarmac as though it were looking for somewhere it had parked; and it rang before he had properly sat down, because she was always early.

“Well?” said his mother.

“Holmqvist wrote.”

“I know he did. He told me last Tuesday that he was going to.”

“Have you read it?”

“No,” said his mother. “It is not mine to read. It is a letter from the Government of Sweden to the heir to the throne of Sweden, and I am the throne, and I am not in it.” A pause. “Is it a good letter?”

“Yes.”

“Good. He used to teach mathematics in Sundsvall. Nine years. He writes like it. One page, and everything on it adds up.” He heard her move on the chair, the velvet, and the small effort, and the breath after it. “What does he say?”

“You said you hadn’t read it.”

“I have not read it. I did not say I did not want to know what was in it.” Something that was nearly a laugh. “Those are separate capacities.”

So he told her. He told her the Course, and entirely, and the Marshal understanding entirely, which made her laugh properly, the real one, so that he had to wait; and Kalmar nation, and the heat, and the thirty-three degrees north. He did not tell her the postscript. She did not ask whether there was one.

“Poor Holmqvist,” said his mother. “He is having a very bad month. The republicans are on the television every night and he cannot answer them, because it is not his business, and he is a man who likes to answer things.” A pause. “They have had their best month in fifty years. I am glad for them. They have been very patient, and polite, and right about a great many things, and I have given them a month for nothing, by telling the truth on television, which is a kind of cheating.”

He looked at the car park.

“Mamma.”

“Yes.”

“He says nobody in Stockholm can ask me to leave now.”

“No.”

“Because of what you said.”

“Because of what I said.”

He sat on the step with the telephone and found that he did not know how to put the next part, and that she was waiting, as she always waited, without filling it.

“Did you say it,” he said, “so that they…”

“I said it because it was true,” said his mother. “You are at university, and you will stay there, and I am proud of where you chose. All three. I would have said them if nobody in Stockholm had ever written you a single letter.” A pause. “That they are also useful is a coincidence. I have been Queen for twenty-three years, Fredde. I know a useful coincidence when I am making one.”

He laughed. He could not help it. He sat on the step under the narrow window and laughed, and above him and below him the stairwell was empty and said nothing, and down the line from London he heard her laugh too, a little, and then the breath, long and careful, drawn up as though it had to be lifted, and a moment longer than a breath should be, and over.

“Your father would like to say something,” said his mother. “He has been holding out his hand.”

The telephone went down a step.

“Letter,” said his father, in English.

“Yes.”

“Good.” A breath. The next word did not come, and his father went to look for it, and Frederick waited on the step in Arizona and did not fill the space. “Keep,” said his father, at last. A breath. “It.”

“I’ve got a folder for it. A blue one. Sam bought it.”

There was a silence on the line from London. Then, very faintly, he heard it begin below the telephone, the breath going in and out in short pieces, the laugh with no voice in it, going on.

“Blue,” said his father, with enormous satisfaction, as though it were the answer to a question he had been asking since the box room in 2024; and gave the telephone back up the stairs.

---

Jack’s message came at two, which was nine at night in Gloucestershire, between the last of the food and the first of the darts.

ORDERED 2 OF THE REPUBLICAN TSHIRTS

And then a photograph, from a website, of a white T-shirt with a small blue and yellow shield on it and three words across the chest. KUNGEN BOR I ARIZONA.

ONE FOR GAZ. HE THINKS ITS A BAND

MUM SAYS IM NOT TO WEAR MINE BEHIND THE BAR

And then, after a minute:

IM WEARING IT BEHIND THE BAR

He sat on the bench outside Old Main in the sun and laughed until a girl going past with a trombone case looked at him, and he wrote back What does Gaz think the band plays, and Jack wrote COUNTRY, and then, a little later, with no capitals, which meant he had gone into the cellar where nobody could see him type:

is she ok. your mum. really

He looked at it for some time.

She’s sitting down, he wrote. She says it’s the opposite.

---

At ten Mr Luna came on with the Phoenix paper under his arm.

It was folded to an inside page. He put it on the desk beside the clipboard and the butterscotch and the paper sun that said IGNACIO, and wrote 10 p.m. 68, and when Frederick came down at eleven he pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot and turned the paper round, without a word, so that it faced the chair.

It was a column on page nine, under a photograph of a building in Stockholm with a great many windows. SWEDEN WILL NOT ASK KING TO LEAVE TEMPE. Under it, a few lines: the Government had said in a statement that it had withdrawn its request for the heir’s course of study, that it would make no request concerning his residence, and that the Prime Minister had written to him; the Republican Association had called the decision honest and alarming; a spokesman for the University of the March had said that the university did not comment on individual students, and that classes would continue as normal.

Frederick read it twice.

“Honest and alarming,” he said.

“That’s the republicans,” said Mr Luna. “I like them. They’re honest.” He took a butterscotch out of the jar and unwrapped it. “And the university doesn’t comment on individual students.”

“No.”

“That’s me,” said Mr Luna, with satisfaction, and put the butterscotch in his mouth. “Thirty years I’ve been telling ‘em that. Every reporter that’s ever come through those doors. I don’t comment on individual students.” He pushed the jar an inch across the desk. “Took the President’s office till now to learn it.”

Frederick took one.

They sat. The radio was playing a game somewhere on the coast. Outside the glass doors the arcade was dark, and across the road over the dentist’s the one window with its light on had its blind halfway down, and Frederick thought about a man from the Swedish embassy who had flown two thousand miles with a letter in a case and been sent across a road to a woman who signed for it and said no deliveries, and who was presumably, by now, in a hotel near the airport, telling somebody about it on the telephone, in Swedish, at great length.

“Good letter?” said Mr Luna, to the crossword.

“Yes.”

“Keep it.”

“My father said that.”

“Your father’s right,” said Mr Luna, and wrote a word in, in pen. “Most people throw out the good ones and keep the bills. Then they’re sixty-eight and they’ve got a drawer full of the electric company.” He looked at the clock and at the grey box on the wall, and wrote 11 p.m. 68 on the clipboard. “Go to bed, son.”

He went up the forty-five steps. In 312 the fire was burning on the screens and Tyler was in the forest with Jussi, saying “Who’s on wood?” with great urgency; and Frederick sat down at his own desk by the door, under the shelf with the maroon jumper and the white cricket hat on it, and took the letter out of its envelope and read it a third time, the whole of it, including the postscript, and then put it in the blue folder, and the folder in the drawer, by itself, where there was nothing else.