By Water

The King’s answer came on the Tuesday after Christmas, by a footman from St James’s, in a small square envelope sealed with black wax and the running horse; and Albert opened it at his table by the window, with Anson standing by, and read it, and handed it to Anson without a word.

Sir, You have My leave to go when you please. I wish you a good passage. Ernest R.

Anson read it, and gave it back. “That is very civil, sir,” he said. “For him.”

“Yes,” said Albert.

He sat and looked at it for some time after Anson had gone down. Two lines, in the large black hand that went uphill; and the second of them was a thing that the King had not been obliged to write. The form required the first. The form did not require anybody to wish anybody a good passage. It was the first thing that the King had said to him since the twenty-second of June, when the old man had stood in the cold room at St James’s and told him that the Sovereign did not go to funerals, and said God keep you, and nothing about her, or him, or anything; and it was the only thing, except God keep you, that the King had ever said to him that was not an order. He did not know what to make of it. He thought that perhaps there was nothing to be made of it, and that it was simply what an old soldier wrote to a young man going on a journey in January, as one would say mind the ice; and he found that he was more moved by it than by anything that had happened to him since the summer, and that he did not at all understand why.

He put it in the drawer with the others, with Stockmar’s letter and Melbourne’s note and the Gazette. Then he took a sheet of paper and began to make his lists.

---

He made lists for a fortnight. It was the thing he was best at, it turned out; Stockmar had always said so, and he had always been a little offended. There were the servants to be paid and pensioned and recommended, and the horses to be sold, all but two, and the carriages, and the books to be packed, and the music, and the pictures, of which there were not many, and the papers, of which there were a great many more than he had supposed; there were the bills of the tradesmen in Mayfair, which he paid, every one, to the last shilling, so that nobody in London should be able to say that the Queen’s husband had gone home owing for his boots; and there were the letters, to everybody he had known in England, more than a hundred, every one in his own hand, which took him the whole of the first week. He wrote to the Archbishop, and to Dr Lushington and Mr Buxton, and to the Society at Exeter Hall, and to the old Duke of Sussex, who had given her away in his black silk cap and had sent Albert a kind incoherent letter in June; and to Brodie, and to Locock, and to Sir James Clark, and to Buckley and Bowater, who had walked at the wheels of the hearse, and to the outrider Brown, who had been a yard from the wheel on the tenth of June and had come to Belgrave Square every month since to ask whether there was anything His Royal Highness wanted, and to be told that there was not. He wrote to Peel, which surprised him. He wrote to Wellington, which surprised Wellington, who wrote back in four lines, very kindly, in a hand like a fence.

He did not write to the King. He had written to the King. There was nothing else to say to the King that the King would wish to hear, or that Albert could say.

The things came on the seventh of January, a Thursday.

He had known that they were coming, because the Duchess had told him, in the first days of December, with a face that he had not seen her wear before: that the King had sent word by the Lord Chamberlain that everything that had been hers at the Palace, everything that was hers and not the Crown’s, was to be packed by her own women and sent to her mother, with His Majesty’s compliments, and that the rooms were to be shut. It had taken the women five weeks. They came in a covered van from the Mews, in the afternoon, in the rain: forty boxes and trunks, corded and labelled in a clerk’s neat hand, which the Duchess’s footmen carried up the stairs one at a time to the rooms on the first floor that she had had cleared for them, while the Duchess stood on the landing in her black and watched every one go by, without a word, as one watches a regiment go by that has lost its colours.

She did not open any of them for three days. Then she sent for Albert.

She had opened one. It stood in the middle of the floor of the little room behind her bedroom, a small leather dressing case with a brass lock, and she was sitting beside it on a low chair with her hands in her lap; and everything that had been on the table in the dressing room at the Palace was in it, in its place, packed in silk by somebody who had known where each thing went: the scent bottle with the gold stopper that the Duchess had given her at sixteen, and the tortoiseshell comb, and the pincushion, and the two brushes with the silver backs.

“I wanted you to have something,” the Duchess said. “Of hers. From there. I have the drawing; you have the drawing; I wanted you to have something that she used every day.” She looked up at him. “I thought one of the brushes. She would laugh at me. She would say it was very German of me. Take whichever you like.”

He knelt down by the case.

He knew which it was. He would have known it in the dark. It was the nearer of the two, the one that had lain on the left of the table, and its silver back was clean and bright, quite clean, cleaner than the other, which had a faint grey bloom on it still in the chasing where the women’s cloths had not reached; and he knew why, and nobody else in the world knew why, except a boy of sixteen in the House of Correction at Tothill Fields, who did not know that anybody knew.

“This one,” he said.

The Duchess nodded, and did not ask him why that one; and he wrapped it in his handkerchief and put it in his breast pocket, where he could feel the weight of it against his ribs, and kept it there.

---

Melbourne came on the Wednesday before he went.

He came on foot, at four in the afternoon, from South Street, in the dusk and the wet, with his collar up and no servant, which Albert understood was meant, and was grateful for; a Prime Minister’s carriage at the door of the Queen’s mother’s house three days before the Queen’s husband left the country would have been in every newspaper in London by the morning, and in every one of them it would have meant something different. The footman showed him up to the second floor, to Albert’s sitting room, where the boxes were standing corded along the wall and the bookshelves were empty and the pictures were down, and the only things left in their places were the piano, which was to be sold, and the drawing in its gilt frame on the table, which was not.

Melbourne stood in the doorway and looked round the room, at the boxes and the empty shelves, with his long tired face.

“You are really going, sir.”

“On Saturday,” said Albert. “From the Tower. To Ostend, and then Brussels, to my uncle, for a week; and then home.” He found that the word came out quite easily now. He had been practising it. “Will you sit down, Lord Melbourne? There is one chair left that is not sold.”

Melbourne sat in it. Albert sat on a packing case. They looked at each other in the lamplight for a while, in the half-dismantled room, the old man and the young one, and neither of them said anything, because there was a great deal that neither of them could say, and they both knew it, and were both, Albert thought, a little relieved to find that the other knew it too.

“I told you in August,” Melbourne said at last, “to wait until you knew what you wanted to go home to. Do you know?”

“No,” said Albert. He thought about it honestly, because Melbourne had asked honestly. “I know what I do not want to stay for. That is not the same thing. Stockmar says that it will do to begin with.” He looked at his hands. “My father is not well. My brother is not serious. There is a great deal to be done in Coburg, Stockmar says, by a man who knows how things ought to be done and does not need to be thanked for doing them. I think he is right. I think that I can do that. I had meant to do it here, and I find that I cannot. It is not the King’s fault, exactly. It is only that here there is nothing for me to do it to.”

“There would have been,” said Melbourne.

“Yes.”

They were quiet again.

“She would have been very angry with me,” Melbourne said, “for letting you go.”

Albert looked up, and found that the old man was smiling, in the lamplight, a little, with his eyes wet; and that he did not mind it, and was not ashamed of his own.

“She would have been very angry with both of us,” Albert said. “She would have said that you were an old fool and I was a young one, and stamped her foot, and cried, and then laughed, and made us both promise something. She always made people promise something.” He took a breath. “Lord Melbourne. May I ask you a thing that I have not asked anybody?”

“Ask it, sir.”

“Do you think that she would have been a great Queen?”

Melbourne did not answer at once. He sat looking at the drawing on the table, the child on the garden seat with her portfolio, for a long time; and Albert saw him decide not to give the answer that would have been kind, which was the one Melbourne gave to most questions, and to give the other.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “Nobody can know. She was twenty-one, and very obstinate, and very honest, and very badly educated, and she was learning faster than anybody I ever taught, and she had you. I think that if she had lived, and you had lived beside her, the two of you might have made something of the Crown in this country that it has never been, and that it needs to be. Something that sensible men could respect, and the poor could love, and nobody need be afraid of. I think she might have been the best of them all. I think she might also have been a very cross old woman who quarrelled with her children.” He smiled again. “Most likely both. But that is a thing for the country to decide, sir, not for me; and the country has decided already, I think. It decided on the tenth of June. It will remember her as a girl who was killed in the road, and it will make her into whatever it needs her to have been, for a hundred years; and none of it will be true, and all of it will be, and there is nothing in the world that you or I can do about it.”

He got up then, slowly, as old men do, with a hand on the arm of the chair; and Albert got up off his packing case; and they stood facing each other in the half-empty room.

“Goodbye, sir,” said Melbourne. “I shall not come to the river. I think you would rather I did not, and I know the King would rather. But I wish you a good passage.”

“So does the King,” said Albert.

“Does he?” Melbourne considered that. “Then I find that I share that much with His Majesty, sir, and I believe it is the only thing I do.” He held out his hand. “You will write to me, sometimes. About Coburg. About anything. I shall like it very much.”

Albert took the hand. Then he did a thing he had not known he was going to do; he put his arms round the old man, in the German way, as his father would have done, and held him for a moment; and felt Melbourne stiffen, with surprise, and then not.

“Thank you,” Albert said, in German, and then in English. “For her.”

Melbourne went down the stairs without saying anything else, and let himself out, and walked away round the square in the wet, an old man with his collar up; and Albert stood at the window and watched him go until the dusk took him.

---

On the Saturday he went down to the river by Constitution Hill.

He had not decided to, until the carriage was at the door. He had planned the route a fortnight ago, as he planned everything now, in advance: by Grosvenor Place and Pimlico, and the Birdcage Walk, and Whitehall, and the Strand, and the City, the long way round, so as not to go near the corner. It had been in his list. And then, at nine o’clock in the morning, on the step of Ingestre House, with the Duchess in the hall behind him in her black and her face wet, and Cart already up on the box with the luggage gone ahead, and Eos at his heel, and Anson holding the carriage door, he had found that he did not want to go the long way round. He had gone the long way round for seven months. He had gone the long way round to the Palace in December, past the end of the wall, so as not to see it, and had come home and washed his hands. He did not think that he could go out of the country by the long way round as well.

“By the Hill,” he said to the coachman. “Up to the corner, and then down to the Palace, and on by the Mall. And stop at the corner. I wish to get down.”

The coachman looked at Anson, and Anson nodded, and the coachman touched his hat.

The Duchess kissed him in the hall, on both cheeks and then on the forehead, and said, Gute Reise, mein lieber Sohn, and Gott behüte dich, and did not cry until he was down the steps; and then she did, standing in the doorway in her black, with the footmen behind her not looking, and lifted her hand, and kept it lifted, until the carriage had turned the corner of the square.

---

It was a raw grey morning, after a week of thaw, with a thin rain that was not quite falling and not quite stopping, and the trees in the Green Park black and dripping, and the road wet and shining. They came round by Hyde Park Corner, past the arch, and turned down into the Hill, and the carriage went slowly down it, at a walk, as he had told the coachman; with the high brick wall of the Palace garden on the right, and the railings of the Park on the left, and nobody on the footpath at all, at that hour, on that day, but a man with a barrow going up and a nursemaid with a child going down.

He had not seen it since the night of the twenty-ninth of June. He had seen it then by torchlight, from the middle of the road, walking behind her coffin, with the people standing along the railings so thick that the railings could not be seen; and he had thought, at the top, at Hyde Park Corner, looking back, that he would never be able to see it again. He saw it now. It was a hundred yards of road. That was all it was. A wall, and some railings, and a wide wet road between them, and the trees.

He knew the place before they came to it, without looking for it. There was a constable there. He was standing on the footpath by the railings, in his blue coat and his oilskin cape, with his hands behind his back, looking at nothing, as a constable looks; and as the carriage drew up he turned, and saw who was in it, and straightened, and touched his hat.

Albert got down. Eos jumped down after him, and stood against his leg.

There was nothing to see. He had known there would not be. The railings were the railings; the road was the road. He stood on the wet footpath by the railings where the young man had stood, in a brown coat, with the two pistols, on the afternoon of the tenth of June, and looked across the road at the place where the carriage had been, by the wall, and did not see anything there at all but the wet road, and the wall, and a little rain. He had been afraid of this place for seven months. He had arranged his life so as not to come within sight of it. He stood in it now and found that it was a place like any other, and that she was not here, and never had been, except for half a minute; and that whatever he had been afraid of, it was not this.

Then he saw the railing.

On one of the uprights of the railing, by his hand, at the height of a woman’s shoulder, there was a bow of black crape tied, and under it a few sprigs of yew and of holly, bound with black thread; not new, a little faded with the weather, but not old either, a week or two at the most. And on the next upright another, older, quite faded, and on the next another; and when he looked along the railing he saw that there were a dozen of them, more, tied to the uprights for twenty yards on either side of the place, black bows and evergreens and one or two little bunches of dried flowers from somebody’s summer, some fresh and some weathered almost white, as if people had been coming to tie them there, one at a time, for months.

“Who puts these here?” he asked the constable.

The constable looked at the railings, and then at the Prince, and then at the railings again, with the face of a man deciding how much he could say.

“People, sir,” he said. “Just people. Women, mostly. Servant girls, on their Sunday out. Some of the soldiers from the barracks. An old gentleman who comes every Saturday, in a chair. They bring them on the tenth, mostly, sir, the tenth of the month, being the day. I’m told to take them down.” He looked at the black bows, along the railing, in the rain. “I don’t, sir. Not as a rule. The sergeant doesn’t ask.”

“No,” said Albert. “Thank you.”

He stood a while longer by the railing, with his hand on the cold wet iron, beside the black bow. He thought of the Murdered Queen, the Young Queen, the names that the street-sellers were already putting on their broadsides, that Anson kept from him and that he knew about anyway: the girl in all the cheap prints in the shop windows, with her hand on her breast and her eyes turned up to heaven, looking nothing whatever like her; the girl the country had decided, as Melbourne said, on the tenth of June, that she had been. He thought that it was not her. He thought that it did not matter that it was not her, to the servant girls who came on their Sunday out to tie a bow of crape on the railings, or to the old gentleman in his chair; that they had loved something, and lost it, and were not wrong to grieve for it, whatever it had been. He thought, standing there, that he was the only person in England, now, except her mother, who remembered her as she had been: cross, and funny, and obstinate, and twenty-one, with her colour up, pushing a warrant across a breakfast table to him in an envelope and saying there. And that he was going away. And that when he had gone, nobody would remember her like that at all, and she would be the girl in the prints, for ever; and that this, too, was a thing that he could not help.

He took the brush out of his breast pocket, still wrapped in its handkerchief, and held it a moment in his hand, by the railing, in the rain. Then he put it back.

“Thank you, constable,” he said again; and got back into the carriage, and Eos after him; and the carriage went on down the hill, at a walk, past the wooden gate of the north wing, which was shut, and round the corner of the Palace, and away along the Mall towards the City and the river.

He did not look back. He found that he did not need to.

---

The steamer lay off the Tower in the Pool, among the colliers, with her steam up and her paddle boxes black with rain, and a thin trail of smoke going away down the river from her funnel in the grey air; and they took him out to her from the Tower stairs in a boat, Albert and Anson and Cart and Eos, with the boatmen pulling against the tide.

He had expected nobody at the stairs. There was nobody official; the King had given him leave, and wished him a good passage, and had done nothing else whatever, and Albert had not expected him to. But there were people. There were perhaps two hundred of them, on Tower Hill and along the wharf and on the stairs, in the rain, standing in their working clothes and their Sunday black, watermen and dockers and porters from the warehouses and women with baskets, who had heard somehow, the way London heard everything; and as he came down the stairs to the boat, they took off their hats. They did not cheer. They did not say anything at all. They stood in the rain on the stairs and the wharf with their hats in their hands, as they had stood on the Hill in June, all the way up, in silence; and he went down through the middle of them to the water, between two lines of bare wet heads, and got into the boat, and they stood and watched him go.

Anson came out with him to the steamer, and up the side, and stood with him on the deck by the paddle box while Cart saw to the luggage below. He had offered, at Christmas, to come to Coburg, and Albert had said no, because Anson was an Englishman with a career to make in England, and would have been wasted in a small German court; and Anson had said that he would rather be wasted, and Albert had said no again, more gently, and Anson had not offered a third time. They stood together by the rail and did not say much.

“Write to me,” Albert said, when the bell went. “As you write. Plainly. Everything.”

“Every week, sir.”

“Not sir,” said Albert. “Not any more. There is no reason.”

Anson looked at him. “Every week, sir,” he said again; and took his hand, and went down the side to the boat, and was pulled away towards the stairs, a young man in a black coat in the stern of a wherry, with his hat in his hand, getting smaller in the rain.

The paddles began to turn.

---

They went down the river through the shipping, slowly at first, among the colliers and the brigs and the barges and the Indiamen at their moorings, with the Tower going behind them in the rain, grey on its hill, and then the long reaches of the docks and the warehouses, and the masts standing up over the roofs on either side like a winter wood; and then faster, as the river widened, past Deptford and the hulks, and past Greenwich, where the hospital stood white along the water with its two domes, and where the King had landed on a Sunday in June to take her Crowns, as George the First had landed; and Albert stood by the rail and watched it all go by, and did not go below.

He had come to England by water, a year ago, in February, in a gale, across the Strait from Calais, sick as a dog the whole way, and had landed at Dover in the rain with his face green and been cheered by a crowd on the pier, and had not cared; he had been going to her. He was leaving it by water, in January, in the rain, from the Tower, cheered by nobody, in silence, and going to nobody, and he was not sick at all. He thought that he had never been so well in his life, or so tired.

The river widened again, and the banks went low and grey and flat, marsh and mud and a few sheep, with the tide running out between them and the gulls going over; and the light began to go, at three, as it went in January, and the shore lights came out, one by one, along the Essex side and the Kent side, very small. Eos lay against his feet in the lee of the paddle box with her nose on her paws. Cart came up once, with a cloak, and put it round him without asking, and went below again.

He took out the brush, at last, when it was nearly dark, and unwrapped it, and held it in the last of the light: a small silver-backed brush, the silver bright, with a few long light-brown hairs still caught in the bristles, which the women at the Palace had not taken out, and which he had not taken out either. He looked at it for a long time. Then he wrapped it up again and put it back where it had been, against his ribs, and buttoned his coat over it.

Twenty-one. Both of them. He had said so to the drawing, in August, on his birthday. He thought that she would be twenty-one now for ever, in the prints, and on the railings, and in her mother’s room, and in his; and that he would be twenty-two in August, and twenty-five, and fifty, and old, in Coburg, with his lists, doing the things that a man could do in a small country without being thanked; and that she would stay where she was, at twenty-one, at the corner of the Green Park, on a June afternoon, with her hand on the shawl, saying that it was spoiled. He did not know how a man lived with that. He thought that he would find out. Other men had. His uncle had sat up at Claremont, and lived, and been a King.

The Nore light came up out of the dark ahead, and the steamer turned towards the open sea, and began to lift to it; and the last of England went down behind her into the night, a line of small lights on a flat shore, and then not that.

He stood at the rail until it was gone. Then he went below, with Eos, to sleep.