The Box

The Private Secretary was in the study at half past seven with the overnight boxes, as he had been every morning since the second of May, and he stood up when Frederick came in, and sat down again when Frederick sat, and did not say good morning until Frederick had.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, sir. Four this morning. None of them long.”

The study was on the first floor at the back, over the garden, and it had been his father’s for the weeks in each year that his father had been in New Westminster, and before that his grandfather’s, and it had a desk that was too big for it and a window that faced the wrong way for the sun, so that in the mornings it was cool and in the evenings it was unbearable. On the desk, in a row, side by side, four boxes. Green, for New Albion. Black, for Hanover. A dark blue that was the Philippines. And the pale blue one with the gold sun on the lid, which was the Plate.

They were shut. They were always shut. He opened one at a time, and closed it before he opened the next, because the rule was that no paper of one realm was read in a room where another’s lay open, and the rule had been his mother’s for seven months and was his now, and he had found in the first week that he liked it, because it meant that he only ever had to be one King at once.

“The Plate’s last, sir, if you don’t mind. There’s a letter.”

“From the Viceroy?”

“From the Viceroy.”

He did the green box first. Two papers from Ottawa, on the advice of his ministers there, which he read and initialled. Then Hanover, which was one sheet in German about a bridge. Then the Philippines, which was an appointment to the bench in Cebu that he signed, George R, at the bottom, in the space that had been left for it, and blotted, because the Philippines liked it blotted.

He shut the dark blue box and put it to one side and pulled the pale blue one towards him and undid the catch.

---

It was the thinnest box of the four. It always was.

On top, a list. Four names for the Order of May, with a paragraph beside each, on the advice of the President of the Council, Florencia Arrieta, whose signature was at the bottom in green ink, very large, sloping uphill. A surgeon in Mendoza. A schoolteacher in the Chaco who had taught in the same village school for forty-four years. A woman who had founded something in La Boca. A retired goalkeeper.

He read the four paragraphs and initialled the list in the corner. The goalkeeper had saved a penalty in 1986 that Theo would know about, and he made a note on his card to ask him.

Then the letter.

It was in a long cream envelope, already opened by the Private Secretary with a paper knife along the top edge, as everything was, and it was four pages, written by hand, in black ink, in English, in a small square hand that leaned slightly backwards, as though the writer were standing a little away from what he wrote. It was dated Casa Rosada, Friday 8th June, and it had come up in the High Commission’s bag on Monday.

Majestad,

I have your letter of the 1st, and I thank you for it, and for what you say in it about the ships, which I have passed to the Minister of Defence, who has passed it to the captains by signal, so that it is now, I imagine, pinned up in two wardrooms somewhere off the coast of Brazil. They are making fourteen knots and will be in the Canal by Saturday week, and in Los Angeles, the Minister says, by the end of the month, which he says is too late and will do anyway. I agree with him on both counts.

Congress has not agreed the shortlist for my successor, and will not before the recess. I had expected this. My five years were up in March, and I stayed on in March because one does not change Viceroys during a regency, and I am staying on now because the Deputies cannot agree among themselves on three names while the Justicialist bench is asking whether they should be choosing three names at all. The bill for an elected Viceroy has its second reading on Wednesday. The government has said it will not oppose it and will not support it, and has given its members a free vote. The President of the Council described this to me on Monday as a position of principle. I described it to her as a position. She laughed, which she does not always.

I mention a small thing, because you asked me in March to tell you the small things as well as the large. A colonel of the garrison has written to a newspaper here to say that the bill is an insult to the Crown and to the Army. This is two insults more than the Minister of Defence considers proper in a serving officer, and the colonel has been spoken to. I do not think it is anything. The Army has written to newspapers before. The difference now is that it apologises afterwards.

I hope that your examinations go well. I sat mine in 1971, at the Colegio Nacional, in a hall with a ceiling painted with the virtues, in such heat that the boy beside me fainted onto his paper and was carried out, and I am told that he passed. I did not look up. I remember that I did not look up, and I remember that I was very proud of not looking up, and that it was the last time for some years I was proud of anything.

Su servidor,

Julio César Mackinlay Zapiola

And at the very bottom, under the signature, in the same square backward-leaning hand, a line in Spanish on its own:

No hay nada aquí que no pueda esperar tres horas.

---

He read the last line twice.

“He knows,” he said.

“Sir?”

“That I’m sitting an exam. He knows it’s three hours.”

“The High Commissioners were told on Friday, sir. I sent the note myself. His Majesty will be unavailable from nine until twelve, New Westminster time, on Tuesday the twelfth, being a candidate in the examinations of the Columbia District Examinations Board. Business for His Majesty may be sent to his Private Secretary, who will lay it before him at noon.” The Private Secretary said it flat, from memory, without looking at anything. “Don Ignacio telephoned the Plate on Friday afternoon to pass it on. He would have.”

“What did Don Ignacio say?”

“He replied by hand, sir.” The Private Secretary took a small envelope from the inside of his jacket and held it out. “On Saturday. I didn’t put it in the box, because it isn’t business.”

It was a single sheet, folded once. The High Commissioner of the United Provinces of the River Plate wrote everything by hand with a broad nib in blue-black ink, and had done so, the Private Secretary had once said, since 1989, when he had sat in the Senate for the federal capital and been told by an elderly Radical that a typed letter was a letter the writer did not want to be held to.

Sir,

I have the Private Secretary’s note. I wish Your Majesty every success. I shall hold the Plate for three hours.

Ignacio Anchorena

He laughed. He could not help it.

“Is that a joke?”

“I believe so, sir. Don Ignacio makes one a year. It was in May last year, about the weather.”

---

He read the Viceroy’s letter a third time while the Private Secretary waited, because it was the kind of letter you read three times.

The Viceroy had come up for the second of May. He had not had to. Each realm’s oath had been taken in the Blue Drawing Room in that realm’s form, in front of that realm’s witnesses, and for the Plate the witnesses had been Don Ignacio and a judge from the High Commission’s legal office, which was enough. But the Viceroy had come anyway, ten hours on a scheduled flight, a small old man in a dark suit with a fountain pen in the breast pocket, and had stood at the side of the room while Frederick took the Plate’s oath in Spanish with his hand on the book, and afterwards had come across the carpet and shaken his hand, once, and said, in Spanish, in a voice that carried no further than the two of them:

Majestad, I have been Viceroy for six years and I have never once done anything. I hope to God I never have to.

And then had gone back down to the airport the same afternoon, because the Plate had no business with him in New Westminster, he said, and the Casa Rosada did not like to be left alone.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary.

“Yes.”

“Will you answer it this evening?”

“This evening. After the hospital.” He folded the letter along its folds and put it back in the envelope, and put the envelope back in the pale blue box on top of the initialled list. “The colonel.”

“Sir?”

“The colonel who wrote to the newspaper. Do we know who he is?”

The Private Secretary did not look at anything.

“A Colonel Iriarte, sir. Rodolfo Iriarte. He commands the First Infantry, which the Plate calls the Patricios, in the barracks at Palermo. The letter was printed on the fourth of June. The Minister of Defence spoke to him on the fifth. The High Commission sent a note of it on the sixth, which I read, and which I did not put in the box, because it was a matter for the Plate’s ministers and they had dealt with it.” He paused for exactly as long as it took to say the next thing properly. “If you would like to see the note, sir, I can have it here this evening.”

“No. If they dealt with it.” He shut the lid of the box. “He said it isn’t anything.”

“He did, sir.”

“Do you think it’s anything?”

“I think the Viceroy has been in the Casa Rosada for six years, sir, and I have been in this room for six weeks.”

Which was the Private Secretary’s way of saying that he did not have an opinion and was not going to have one, and Frederick had learned in the first week that this was not reticence but a principle, and that the principle had a reason, which was that the King of the River Plate was advised in the affairs of the River Plate by its ministers and by nobody else, and certainly not by a man from the Realm’s civil service who happened to have opened the envelope.

He did up the catch.

---

“The car’s at eight, sir.”

“I know.”

“Sergeant Castellanos will be in his office from half past eight, and in the corridor outside the gymnasium from nine. Mr Lumsden has been told there is a protection officer on the premises and has been asked to treat him as a member of the school’s staff. Mr Lumsden has replied that the Board does not admit members of the school’s staff to an examination room either.”

“Good.”

“I’ll be here until a quarter to twelve, sir, and at the school from noon.”

“You don’t need to come to the school.”

“No, sir,” said the Private Secretary, in a tone that meant that he would be at the school from noon.

He put the four boxes on the trolley, the Plate’s on top, and wheeled them to the door, and stopped there with his hand on the handle, which he never did.

“Sir.”

“Yes.”

“The Viceroy’s examination. 1971. The boy who fainted.” He did not turn round. “I looked it up on Monday, out of interest. It was a sweltering summer in Buenos Aires that year. The Colegio Nacional records the examination as having been held in temperatures of thirty-eight degrees in the hall.” He considered the door. “I thought you might like to know it wasn’t an exaggeration.”

“Thank you.”

“It isn’t advice, sir.”

“I know.”

The door shut. He heard the trolley go off along the corridor on the old boards, the one wheel that squeaked, past Petrossian on his chair, and the lift gate, and the lift going down.

He sat for a moment at his grandfather’s desk in the cool of the wrong-facing window, with nothing in front of him at all.

No hay nada aquí que no pueda esperar tres horas.

There is nothing here that cannot wait three hours.

He got up and went to find his bag.