After 1865

At half past six Alexander ate breakfast.

He ate it in the dining hall, at the table by the window with the butte a mile off, in the grey before the sun had come over the Superstitions, and he ate all of it: a bowl of porridge, which he called by another name and salted, and a slice of toast cut into four, and a cup of tea, black. He ate it at the pace he did everything, without hurrying and without stopping, and when he had finished he laid the spoon in the empty bowl parallel to the edge of the table, and looked at the programme beside his plate, and took the pencil out of his shirt pocket, and ticked 06.30.

Frederick watched him do it over his own waffle.

“You’re looking at me,” said Alexander.

“I’m looking at the butte.”

“The butte is behind me.”

“It’s reflected,” said Frederick. “In the window.”

Alexander turned round in his chair and looked at the window, in which there was nothing reflected at all but the dining hall and the ABC on the television above the waffle iron and the two of them at the table, and turned back.

“It is not,” he said.

“No.”

“Thank you,” said Alexander, and put the pencil back in his pocket, and that was all either of them said about it.

At the next table Kessler was drinking coffee, three sugars, and not there. He had his music on the table beside the cup, a thin folder with Pike on it in his square hand, for Tuesday, and he was reading the bass line with one finger moving very slightly on the table, in time, as a man reads a timetable he intends to catch.

---

At five to nine Frederick walked him to Tolliver.

It was on his way. It was not on his way. History was in the brick building with the ivy at half past ten, on the far side of the library, and Tolliver was across the mall in the other direction, and there was nothing in the other direction at five to nine that Frederick needed except to see a door. He walked anyway, and Alexander let him, which was the arrangement, and neither of them said what the arrangement was.

It was sixty-one degrees on the mall at five to nine, and the sky was very clean, and the palms stood in their rows with their shadows long and thin across the paving, and everybody on the mall was in a jumper, carrying a coffee in a cardboard cup from the cart, and looking slightly ill, because it was the first day.

The cart had written FRED on his cup again. It had written ALEX on the other.

“They remember,” said Alexander, looking at his cup.

“They write it on everybody’s.”

“They wrote ALEX on mine in September, before I had told them. I asked how they knew, and the girl said I looked like an Alex.” He turned the cup a quarter-turn in his fingers, so that the name faced him. “I have never been told I looked like anything.”

The doors of Tolliver were open. Room 104 was on the ground floor, the first on the left, eighty seats in rows going up, and the door of it stood open into the corridor, and in the doorway, with the leather bag on his shoulder and a cardboard cup in his hand, in the crumpled linen jacket over a jumper, with the tie with the fish on it, stood Brennan, as he stood at the door on the first day of every semester, saying a word to each of them as they went in.

He saw them coming down the corridor.

Frederick watched the slight check in him: the cup lowered an inch, the weight going back onto the other foot. Brennan looked at Alexander. He looked at him for about as long as it takes to read a line on a board, the buttoned jacket and the cup with ALEX on it and the face; and Frederick, a step behind, watched the professor’s eyes go over all of it, once, and find whatever they were looking for, and stop.

“Mr Hohenzollern,” said Brennan.

That was all.

He did not say welcome back. He did not say how are you, or good to see you, or anything about December, or a C, or a piece in the Devil’s Advocate that the whole campus had read on a Tuesday before finals. He said the name, at the door, as he said a name to everybody at the door, and stood aside half a step to let him in.

“Professor,” said Alexander, and went in, and up the rows, to the back.

Brennan looked at Frederick in the corridor.

He did not say anything to him at all. He looked at him over the cardboard cup for a moment with an expression Frederick had seen once before, on the mall in November, when he had stopped and not asked; and then he nodded, very slightly, and turned and went into the room after the last of them, and the door swung to on its closer behind him.

Frederick stood in the corridor of Tolliver at one minute to nine with FRED on his cup.

Through the narrow window in the door he could see the board, and Brennan’s back at it, and the chalk going, in large rapid capitals, writing up again, for the second semester, the question that had been there since August:

CAN A MAN BE A CITIZEN AND A SOVEREIGN AT ONCE?

And in the back row, by himself, with the notebook open and the pencil laid beside it, parallel to the edge, sitting forward, a young man in a buttoned linen jacket looking at the question as though it had been written for him, which it had.

Frederick went to History.

---

The ivy on the brick building was bare for the winter.

It went up the walls in a great grey net of stems with almost no leaves on it, so that you could see the brick behind it, dark red and old, and the white mortar, and the shape of the windows, which in September had been green caves. The building was the oldest on that side of the library and the steps up to its door were worn hollow in the middle, like the old steps on the butte.

Ashby had a new tie.

It was green, with small yellow ducks on it, and it was a Christmas present, Frederick thought, from somebody who loved him and had not met many historians, and it was still too tight. He stood at the front of the room behind the lectern with his notes in both hands and looked out at forty students on the first morning of the second semester of the survey, and at the third row, and at Frederick in it, and went pink, and looked down at his notes.

“Good morning,” said Ashby. “Um. Welcome back. And welcome, um, to those of you who weren’t here in the fall, which is some of you. This is HST 110. The Realm since 1865. If you thought you were in Geology, it’s the building across the quad, and you should, um, go now, it’s a long walk.”

Nobody went.

“Right,” said Ashby. “Good.” He put the notes on the lectern, and squared them, and then he looked up at the third row again, directly, which he had never done in the fall without asking a question, and said:

“I’m not going to ask you anything today, Mr Hanover.”

The room went very quiet.

“I said that in the fall, at the end, in a comment on a paper, which I wasn’t supposed to… it was a joke. Sort of.” Ashby’s ears were the colour of the ducks’ beaks. “But I’ve thought about it over the break, and I think it’s, um, I think it’s a methodological point. Actually. And so for the first part of the semester, which is the first sixty years, roughly, the witness is going to be excused.” He looked down at the notes. “Mostly because nobody you’ve had breakfast with was alive. That’s just, um. That’s just chronology.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“I’ll ask you about the fifties,” said Ashby, to the notes, very quickly, and turned round to the board.

---

He wrote on it, in a small neat hand that went slightly uphill, 1 January 1865.

Then he stood back and looked at it, the way a man looks at a picture he has hung to see if it is straight.

“The Emancipation Measure,” said Ashby, “received Assent on the first of January 1865. From the Governor-General, Edward Everett. In New Westminster. After the rebellion had collapsed. It ended legal ownership of human beings in the Realm, by Act of Parliament, eighty-two years after the Charter.” He turned round. “Everett died two weeks later. On the fifteenth. In Boston. So the man who gave Assent to the end of slavery didn’t see the end of the month.”

He let that sit for a moment, and the room let it sit, and Frederick found that the nervous young man with the ducks on his tie had stopped being nervous, quite suddenly, between one sentence and the next, the way Brennan stopped being a professor and became an argument; and that he was standing at the front of the room with his hands flat on the lectern, talking about a man who had given Assent a hundred and seventy years ago in a house Frederick had been to dinner in, as though he had known him.

“Your schoolbooks gave you a sequence,” said Ashby. “Most of you. The Measure of 1865, the Rights Act of 1866, the Fourth Amendment of 1873. One, two, three. It settles the war. It’s on the posters.” He picked up the chalk again. “And the sequence is real. Every one of those happened. I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s a myth.” He wrote 1866 under 1865, and 1873 under that. “I’m going to spend fifteen weeks telling you what’s missing from it.”

A girl in the second row put her hand up.

“What’s missing from it?”

Ashby looked at the three dates on the board.

“Mostly,” he said, “the people it didn’t apply to. For about eighty years.” He put the chalk down. “That’s this semester. That’s the whole course, really. The sequence is real and the sequence is wrong, and they’re not the same thing, and the most useful thing I can teach you is how to hold both of them at once without dropping either.”

Frederick wrote that down. He wrote it down exactly, in the margin of the notebook, real and wrong, not the same thing, and underlined it, and did not know why.

---

The textbook was on the desk in front of him, closed.

He had bought it on Friday at the bookshop for an amount he had not told Sam. It was called A Realm of Many Crowns: The United Kingdom of America since 1865, third edition, and it was by two professors at King’s in New York, whose names were on the cover in a typeface that suggested they had argued about the order. On the front there was a photograph of the river at New Westminster in the snow, grey and white, with the Parliament on the far bank and a single sculler on the water in a red cap. It had eleven hundred and four pages.

“You’ll need the textbook,” said Ashby, “every week. I’m sorry. I know it’s, um, large. I didn’t write it.” He looked at it on the lectern, where his own copy lay with a great many coloured slips sticking out of the top like a hedge. “I’d have written a shorter one. Everybody says that. Nobody does.”

At the end of the hour, as they were standing up, he looked at the third row once more.

“Mr Hanover.”

Frederick stopped.

“That was, um. Fifty minutes.” Ashby looked at his watch, as though checking. “I didn’t ask you anything.”

“No.”

“Good,” said Ashby, with enormous relief, and then, as Frederick reached the door, unable to help it, in a rush: “Does your family have a view of Everett?”

Frederick turned round in the doorway.

Ashby had his hand over his eyes.

“Sorry,” said Ashby. “Sorry. Fifty-one minutes. Don’t answer that.”

“Not at breakfast,” said Frederick.

Ashby took his hand away from his eyes and looked at him, and Frederick saw him write it down, in his head, as a primary source, and then, visibly, cross it out.

---

Geology was at one, across the quad, in a building made of concrete that looked as though it had been poured in one afternoon by people who did not like windows.

The geologist was a lean man of about sixty with a sun-dried face and a small hammer on his belt in a leather loop, which he did not use and did not explain, and he began by drawing the butte on the board in three lines, a long low one and a steep one and a flat one on top, and then, underneath it, a great many more lines, going down, sideways, folded, cut off, starting again.

“That’s the butte,” he said. “The bit you can see. The bit you climb in the dark on your birthday and take a picture of.” He tapped the lines underneath. “That’s the butte too. Most of it. That’s what we’re doing this semester. The inside.”

He put the chalk down and looked at them.

“I’m not going to tell you how old it is today,” he said. “Because you won’t believe me, and then you’ll look it up, and then you’ll believe the website and not me. I’ll tell you this. It’s older than the Charter.” He considered. “By a long way. By more of a way than you have words for yet.” He picked up the chalk again. “And it doesn’t care. You’ll want it to. Everybody wants a rock to care. It’s been sat there through everything that ever happened in this Valley and it hasn’t noticed any of it. That’s the first thing you learn about rocks. They don’t care what you think of them, and they’re not on your side, and they’re not against you either. They’re just under you.”

At two he took them out to look at it.

They walked across the campus in a long straggling line behind him, thirty students in jumpers, to the foot of the butte, to the gate with the green board on its post, which said PATH OPEN and nothing about summer, because it was January; and then up the stepped path, the old steps first, cut in the rock and worn hollow like the steps of the History building, and then the concrete and the maroon rail, as far as the first bend, where he stopped and put his hand flat on the rock face beside the path, and told them to do the same.

Frederick put his hand on it.

It was cool. It had been warmer than his hand in August, a year and a half ago, the first time, as though something under the hill were breathing. In February, in the dark, it had been cold. Now, in the afternoon, in January, it was neither: it was the temperature of a thing that had been there a very long time and had stopped bothering about the air.

“Older than the Charter,” said the geologist, at the front. “Feel that. That’s what older means.”

Frederick took his hand away.

He had the textbook in his backpack. He had not thought about it until the second flight of steps, and then he had thought about very little else. It sat in the bottom of the pack against his spine like a paving stone, eleven hundred and four pages of the Realm since 1865, with his father in it and the river at New Westminster on the cover, and he had carried it up the stepped path of Hayden Butte behind a man who said the rock did not care, and his shoulders knew every page.

---

“It’s the heaviest thing I’ve ever carried up a hill,” he said, in the lobby at five.

Sam looked at the backpack.

“That’s not true.”

“It’s true.”

“You carried Tyler up a hill,” said Rhys, from the lounge doorway. “In May.”

“He walked.”

“Mostly,” said Rhys darkly.

Sam held out his hand for the textbook, and Frederick took it out of the backpack and gave it to him, and Sam took it in both hands, and his eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch, which was a great deal, for Sam; and then he went across the lobby to the post-room hatch, which was open, because it was the first day of semester and the post room was full of parcels from people’s mothers, and asked the student behind it in a perfectly level voice whether he might use the scale.

The student behind the hatch looked at him.

“For a book?”

“It’s a claim,” said Sam. “I’m testing it.”

He put the textbook on the scale, flat, squarely, in the middle, and they all looked at the needle, which went round, and thought about it, and stopped.

Sam wrote it in the notebook.

Textbook. 4 lb 3 oz.

“Is that a lot?” said Frederick.

“For a book,” said Sam, “it’s a lot.” He considered the needle. “For a hill, I don’t know yet. I’ll need more hills.” He took the textbook off the scale and gave it back. “It’s true, though,” he said, as though conceding a point in a game. “For now.”

---

At eight Alexander came back from the library with Rhys, both of them carrying copies of the same book for The Executive II, and both of them with the face of a man who has been arguing for three hours on a staircase and has not lost.

“He has begun with emergencies,” said Alexander, putting the book on the desk by the door, square to the edge. “Again. He began with emergencies in September.”

“He likes emergencies.”

“He likes executives who like emergencies,” said Alexander. “It is not the same.” He took off the linen jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. “I have three points.”

“Of course you have.”

“Rhys has three as well. They are different points. We shall see on Wednesday whose are correct.”

“Mine,” said Rhys, from the doorway, and went pink, and went to 316.

Alexander sat down at the desk. The grey box stood by the door where he had put it for Kessler, empty, with the red seal broken. It had come at seven that morning, and he had done it before Brennan, every paper, all the way to the end; and Frederick had looked at the broken seal on his way out to breakfast, as he had looked at it every morning since Christmas, and had not said anything, and was going to go on looking.

He lay on the bed by the window with the textbook on his knees, four pounds and three ounces of it, and did not open it at the beginning. He opened it at the back, at the index, where the small type ran in two columns down every page for thirty pages, and turned through it to the E’s.

Ernest V. It was most of a column. It had sub-entries, indented, in smaller type still: accession, and coronation, London, and American recognition, and Long Quiet Reign, the, and May Day, and a great many others, each with its page numbers after it, and at the bottom of the column, abdication, with a single number.

He did not look up any of the numbers.

He turned on through the index, past the F’s, to the G’s, and found it at the bottom of a page, between George III and Georgia, Province of. It was one line.

George V, it said, and a single page number, near the very end.

He did not look that up either.

He closed the book, and put it on the floor beside the bed, where it lay with the river at New Westminster face up on the carpet of no colour, and the sculler in his red cap on the grey water, going somewhere in the snow; and he lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.

“You have not read it,” said Alexander, from the desk, without turning round.

“I looked at the index.”

“What is in it?”

“Dad’s a column.” He looked at the ceiling. “I’m a line.”

Alexander did not turn round.

“It is the third edition,” he said. “They will add to you.” He wrote the next morning’s programme at the desk, in his own hand, short, and laid the pencil down beside it, parallel to the edge. “It will be wrong. They will have to correct it in the fourth.”

“How do you know it’ll be wrong?”

“Because you are in the room,” said Alexander, “and they are not.”

At half past ten exactly his lamp went off.