Fourteen Answers

At twenty past six the river was black and the sky over Virginia was only a little less black, and the boathouse lights made a long yellow smear on the water that the current pulled at and could not move.

There were nine of them on the landing stage in the cold, in leggings and old jumpers and hats, stamping. Eight to row and Nadia to cox. Nadia was a junior and was a head shorter than anybody else in the crew and had a voice that could be heard, the coach said, in Maryland. She stood at the end of the stage with her hands in her armpits and her megaphone hanging from a cord round her neck, looking at them as though they were a delivery she had not ordered.

“Race day,” she said.

“Race day,” said the crew, all together, flat, the way they said it every time, because it was never race day. The second eight trained for every race on the calendar, the Head of the Potomac and the Georgetown sprints and the long cold one in March that went down past the Navy Yard, and entered none of them, because the Household allowed the river and not the regatta, and the crew had decided in Frederick’s first fall, without asking him, that if one of them couldn’t race then none of them would mind. So every outing was race day. They warmed up for races they would not row and practised starts for races they would not start and Nadia timed them against crews that would never be in the water beside them, and it was, Frederick thought, the best joke he had ever been part of, and he had never once heard any of them explain it to anybody.

“Hands on,” said Nadia.

They lifted the boat off the rack, eight of them, and walked it down the stage over their heads, and rolled it into the water. It went in with a sound like a held breath let go.

Castellanos was in the launch already, beside Mr Odum, the coach, with the little outboard muttering at the stern. He had a scarf on that Frederick had not seen before, green and very long, and was looking at the far bank with an expression of great patience. He did not like the river. He had told Frederick once, in the car, that he had grown up in Tucson, and that a body of water you could not see the other side of in the dark was against nature, and that he would rather stand in front of a man with a knife. He came every time anyway, in the launch, with the coach, and looked at the far bank.

“Numbers,” said Nadia.

“Bow,” said the boy at the front. “Two.” “Three.” “Four.”

“Five,” said Frederick.

“Six.” “Seven.” “Stroke.”

“Good,” said Nadia. “Nobody’s died in the night. Let’s go.”

---

He rowed at five. Five was the middle of the boat, the engine room, where the heaviest rowers went, the ones who were there not to be clever but to push. He had been put there in his first season because he was tall and had long arms and because, Mr Odum said, he did what he was told and didn’t think about it, which was the highest praise Mr Odum gave anybody. Frederick had not told him that it was the first place in his life where he had been praised for not thinking about something.

They paddled up past the boathouses in the dark, light pressure, just moving, and the city slid by on the left, lit in patches, the long dark bulk of the old warehouses and the new flats on the waterfront with their windows on, people up early or not yet in bed, and on the right the black trees of the Virginia shore with nothing behind them at all.

He watched the back in front of him. That was the whole of rowing at five: you watched the back of the person in front, which was Sam Ellison at six, a back in a grey jumper with a hole in the elbow, and you did what it did, a fraction after, and you listened to Nadia, and you did not look at the water, and you did not look at the sky, and you did not think about anything. Your legs went down and your back swung and your arms came in, and the blade came out and went back and went in again, and the boat ran on under you between the strokes, and you did it again.

“Square early,” said Nadia. “Two, you’re late. Five, nice. Keep that.”

His hands were cold. He could feel the cold in the handle through his palms, and the water off the blade going down his wrist inside his sleeve every few strokes, very cold, and he did not mind.

“Build in two,” said Nadia. “This is the start of the Head. We’re three lengths down on Georgetown and nobody’s told them we’re here. In two. One. Two. Up.”

They went up. The boat lifted and began to run, and the sound of it changed, the hiss under the hull getting higher and longer, and the bubbles off the blades going past in the black water in rows, and Nadia’s voice going up with it, calling the rate, calling the catches, calling Georgetown, who were not there, and the Navy, who were not there, and a crew from Philadelphia she had made up that morning and named after her grandmother’s dog, and the boat went up the Potomac in the dark faster than it had any right to go, racing nobody, eight boys and a girl with a megaphone, and for the length of that piece Frederick did not know anything at all except the back of Sam Ellison’s jumper and the next stroke and the next.

“Easy,” said Nadia. “Easy there. Hold water.”

They stopped. The boat ran on and settled. Everybody breathed. Frederick sat with the handle against his chest and his breath going up white in the light from the launch and found that he was grinning at nothing, like an idiot, in the cold.

“Not bad,” said Nadia. “We’d have come fourth.”

“Out of how many?” said the stroke.

“Four,” said Nadia, and the boat laughed, all of it, in the dark, and across the water in the launch Mr Odum shook his head and Castellanos went on looking at the far bank.

For an hour and ten minutes, from the landing stage to the landing stage, he was a person who rowed at five. He thought afterwards, in the changing room, with the river smell on him and his hands red, that it had been the first hour since Tuesday in which he had not once thought about his father, or a table with nothing on it, or fourteen anythings, and he felt guilty about it, and then he did not, because Nadia had said five, nice, and he had kept it.

---

At school Theo said, “You smell of river.”

“I know.”

“Good river or bad river?”

“Brown river.”

“That’s bad river,” said Theo, and moved his chair six inches away, with ceremony, and then six inches back when Mr Abernathy came in, because Mr Abernathy would have asked.

Nothing happened all day. He held onto that afterwards. Friday went by like a Friday: history, and chemistry, and a French test he did badly in and knew he had, and lunch at the long table where they talked about the French test and about Felix’s tie, and in the afternoon two periods of English back to back, a poem about a man looking at a field, which Frederick did not understand and said so, and the teacher said that was a perfectly good place to start.

At four he went to the hospital. His father was tired. He read him Saturday’s trains, which were thinner than the weekday ones, and his father listened with his eyes shut and said nothing at all, not one word, the whole hour, and Frederick did not ask him to, and at five the nurse came, and he went.

---

His mother was at the kitchen table when he came down after supper, at the end nearest the stove, with a folder in front of her that was not a newspaper.

It was a plain manila folder with a white label on it. The label said Regency Office in Dame M’s handwriting and nothing else. His mother had a pencil in her hand and was making small marks down the margin of the top sheet, and she did not cover the folder when he came in, which she would have done a week ago, and he noticed that she did not.

“Sit,” she said, in Swedish. “Are you tired?”

“I rowed.”

“I know you rowed. Mr Odum telephoned to say you’d come back alive, which he does every Friday, and which I have never once asked him to do.” She turned a page. “Are you tired?”

“No.”

“Liar.” She went on making marks. “Bridget has left you some cake in the tin. It’s for Sunday. Have a piece now and she’ll make another and pretend she hasn’t.”

He got the tin and a plate and sat down opposite her with the cake, and ate some of it, and watched her pencil.

“Is that them?” he said.

“Some of them.”

“Can I ask?”

His mother put the pencil down. She looked at him across the table for a while, the way she had looked at him on Wednesday morning, as though she were deciding not whether to answer but how much.

“Your father asked them a question,” she said. “Each of them. What an abdication would require, in their own law. Not whether he should. Only what it would take, if he did.” She turned the folder a little towards him, not all the way. “They are answering. One at a time. Each in its own way, in its own language, at its own speed, which is exactly what your father would want and exactly what is making Dame Margaret want to scream.”

“How many?”

“Ask me which.”

“Which?”

His mother almost smiled. It was the question his father would have asked, and she knew it, and so did he.

She turned the top sheet over and read from the list underneath, which was in Dame M’s handwriting too, very small and square, with the times beside each line.

“Britain. Wednesday night. They answered first, and longest, and they have offered to draft something that everybody could use, if it comes to it, so that nobody has to write fourteen different Acts and then find out they disagree.” She moved her pencil down. “New Albion. Thursday morning. An Act of their Parliament, which they say they could pass in two days, and the Bloc Québécois will vote against it as unnecessary, the way they did with the regency, and they want your father to know that it’s nothing personal.”

Frederick laughed, through cake.

“Ireland. Thursday. An Act of the Oireachtas, which they say they did in a day last time, for the regency, and could do in a day again, and would rather not have to.” Her pencil moved. “South Africa, Thursday afternoon. Brunswick and Hanover, this morning, both at once, from the two Landtage, in German, in the same envelope, because Caroline made them.” She looked up. “Your aunt says to tell you she’s thinking of you, and that you’re to eat.”

“I’m eating.”

“I’ll tell her.” Down the list. “Normandy, this morning. A resolution of the Estates at Rouen, which they say would take a morning, and they’d like it noted that they’d do it in French. The River Plate, this afternoon. An Act of Congress. The Philippines, this afternoon, the same.”

“That’s nine,” Frederick said.

“Ten. Malaya wrote, very politely, to say that it didn’t need to answer, because it follows Britain whatever happens, and that it hoped your father was comfortable.” His mother made a mark. “That counts. Dame Margaret has counted it.”

“So four haven’t.”

“Four haven’t.”

“Which four?”

“The Raj, which takes its time over everything and would like you to know that it is taking it because the question deserves it. New Wessex, which is asleep, because it’s tomorrow morning there, and has said it will answer when it wakes. The West Indies, which is still in the hurricane, and has said it will answer when it can, and nobody is going to hurry a federation that’s rebuilding Saint Lucia.” She closed the folder. “And us.”

“Us?”

“The Realm.”

He looked at her. He had somehow not thought of that. He had thought of the realms as the others, the places in his father’s study with boxes in different colours, the places his father went to on aeroplanes. He had not thought of the one he was sitting in.

“Why haven’t we?”

“Because ours is the hardest,” said his mother. “No King of this Realm has ever abdicated. There’s no Act for it. There’s never been one. The law officers are looking at what Parliament would have to do and how, and whether the Charter says anything, and it says one thing, in Article Two, which they’re reading very carefully.” She put her hand flat on the closed folder. “And because Lord Whitlock’s government has a piece of paper that says what it may do, and this isn’t on it, and they are trying to work out who in the Realm is allowed to answer a question that nobody wrote down.”

“That’s funny.”

“It’s very funny,” said his mother. “Lord Whitlock does not think it is funny.”

Frederick ate the last of the cake. He looked at the folder under her hand, the plain manila with Regency Office on it, ten answers in it and four not yet, from fourteen places that all, in the end, said the same thing in different words: if he does this, this is what we must do. He thought of his father in the Sunday game, a Bill introduced at Ottawa, which Crown?, and of all the Sundays he had got it right, and the two in 2027 that his father had lost on purpose.

“Which Crown assents?” he said.

His mother looked up.

“Here,” he said. “If Parliament passes an Act. For Papa. Which Crown assents to it?”

And she did smile then, properly, for the first time in days, a smile that went all the way up into her eyes and stayed there.

“Yours,” she said. “The American one.” She held up her right hand, with the pencil in it, and turned it so that he could see the back of it. “By this hand. For your father.” She put the hand down. “The Governor-General can’t. A representative can’t touch an abdication. It needs the King, or a Regent. And the King can’t hold a pen for long enough.” She shook her head. “It would be me. In my study. Signing the end of your father’s reign with the pen he gave me for my birthday.”

“Do you want to?”

“No,” said his mother. “And I will. Both of those are true at once.” She looked at him. “That was the right question. He’d have asked it.”

“I know. That’s why I asked it.”

---

She did not open the folder again. She sat with her hand on it, and he sat with his empty plate, and the clock above the range said ten past nine, which meant fourteen minutes past, and Bridget’s radio on the dresser was playing something with violins in it, very low.

“There’s one more thing,” said his mother, “and then you’re going to bed, because you rowed, and because you’re fifteen, and both of those are true at once as well.”

“What?”

“London is drafting. The terms. If it comes to it, every realm would use the same paper, so that nobody is a day ahead of anybody else, and the successions never come apart. Your father would want that more than anything. It’s the whole of what he’s done for fifty years.” She paused. “There’s a clause in it with a gap.”

“What gap?”

“A name.”

He didn’t understand, and then he did, all at once, the way he had understood them at the hospital on Tuesday.

“Mine,” he said.

“Yours. The name you’d reign under. If it comes to it.” His mother said it plainly, in Swedish, the way she said hard things. “It doesn’t have to be Frederick. It can be any of your names. Or none of them. Kings choose. Your father chose to keep his own, and his father did. Your great-great-grandfather didn’t.” She turned her pencil over in her fingers. “London would like to put something in the gap. Not to decide anything. So that the paper is ready. I said I’d ask you.”

“Now?”

“Not now. Whenever you like. Or never, and they’ll leave it blank, and we’ll do it on the day.”

He sat and looked at the clock.

He had never thought about it. That was the strange thing. He had known his whole life that he would be King one day, the way you know you will be old one day, as a fact about a person who was not quite you yet, a long way off down a road, and in all that time he had never once thought about what that person would be called. He had assumed, if he had assumed anything, that it would be Frederick, because he was Frederick. Frederick the First. He tried it in his head and it sounded like a ship.

“What did Papa want?” he said. “When he was me. Did he think about it?”

“He said he never did, because he always knew he’d keep his own name, because his father had.” His mother looked at the folder. “He said the name was the least important thing about it. He said the people would decide what it meant, and he’d find out from them.”

Frederick thought about that.

Then he thought about the study in London, and the boxes, and the long row of portraits on the stairs at Columbia Palace that he went past every morning without looking at, his father and his grandfather and the Ernests, five of them, and before them the old ones in wigs. He thought about the first of them, the one at the bottom of the stairs, in a red coat, with a lot of lace and a sad, heavy face, who had been King of America first, before there was an America to be King of, who had received the petition, the history books said, and read it, and changed his mind about nothing and everything. Who had never once crossed the sea to the place that was his.

None of them had. He had looked it up, once, in the library, the summer he was twelve. Every King of America had lived in London. Every one. They came for a week, or a month, for a coronation or a jubilee or a funeral, and went home.

He lived here. He went to school on Garfield Street. He rowed on the Potomac at five.

“George,” he said.

His mother looked up.

“George,” said Frederick again, trying it. It sounded strange and old and not at all like a ship. “Like the first one. The first King of America was a George. He never came. I’d be the first one who lives here.” He stopped, and went on, because she was waiting, and because it was the truth. “I’d like to start again from him. From the first one. Not from Papa. Papa’s his own. I don’t want to be Ernest the Sixth and have everybody think I’m him and find out I’m not.”

His mother said nothing for a while.

“You weren’t christened George,” she said.

“I know. That’s the point. Frederick’s me. I want to keep Frederick for me. For the things I sign that aren’t the King.” He thought about it. “For letters.”

“Hanover had a George the Fifth,” said his mother. “In the eighteen-sixties. Ernest the Second. He reigned there as Georg.”

“Then Hanover can have two,” said Frederick. “They won’t mind. They’re used to us.”

His mother laughed. It was short and surprised and she put her hand over her mouth afterwards as if she had not meant to, and looked at him over it, and her eyes were wet, and she did not do anything about that either.

She took an envelope out of the back of the folder, an old one with a Swedish stamp on it, and turned it over, and wrote on the back of it in pencil, in her own hand, one word. She did not show him. She put it back in the folder, and closed the folder, and put her hand on top of it.

“I’ll give it to London,” she said. “If it comes to it.”

“If it comes to it.”

“Bed.”

He stood up and put his plate in the sink and the cake tin back on the dresser where Bridget would find it and pretend she hadn’t. At the door he turned round. His mother was still at the end of the long table, in yesterday’s cardigan, with her hand on the folder and the clock above her four minutes slow.

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“Did I get the Crown right? The one that assents?”

“Yes,” said his mother, without looking up. “You always do. Go to bed, Frederick.”

He went.