Five Hours

He rose at a quarter to five, and did not write it down, because he could not.

Mary would write it for him at breakfast, in her own clear hand that sloped the other way: 10. IV:45. Wednesday. She had written every heading since the eighteenth of May, and every line beneath them, at his desk and with his pen, while he walked up and down behind her and found the words; and the diary that he had kept in his own hand since he was twelve years old had become, for more than three weeks, a thing that he said aloud. He did not like it. He found that he said less than he would have written, and said it better, and did not know which of these he disliked more.

He had left off the sling on Saturday. The black silk handkerchief lay folded in the drawer of the washstand, and the arm hung at his side again like an arm, and he could lift it nearly to his shoulder if nobody was watching. But the hand was another matter. He had dictated the sentence himself, on Saturday, standing at the window, and Mary had taken it down without looking up: My right hand had already been much disabled before this accident, and I have no hope of recovering entirely from its effects. It was the truest thing he had said in a fortnight, and it had cost him nothing to say, which was how he knew it was true.

He read his chapters by the window while the light came. Below him the ground fell away down the Rise to Columbia Palace, pale and shuttered in the early light, with its shallow portico and its long low wings and nobody living in it; and beyond it the Axis ran east across the grass to Charter Hill and Parliament House, with a few cows in the mist and a cart going along the road at the edge of it. A mocking-bird was singing in the locust tree by the gate. It was going to be hot again. It had stormed on Saturday night, a tempest of rain and very heavy thunder, and been cold on Sunday, and on Monday the heat had come back as if it had only stepped out of the room.

At seven his granddaughter came down and read to him from the French Bible while he shaved, and stumbled over iniquités, and said it again, and got it right, and looked at him to see whether he had noticed, and he had.

---

Judge Cranch came at eight, while they were still at breakfast.

He was the Governor-General’s first cousin, the son of his mother’s sister, a mild, slow, kindly man of seventy who had sat on the bench of the District’s court since the government came to the city, and who had the gift, rare in a judge, of never seeming to have come about anything. He took a cup of coffee, and admired the Governor-General’s arm, and asked after Mrs Adams, who was not down, and talked about the storm; and then he said, in exactly the same voice, that he had come to see whether anything could be done for William.

William Smith was the son of Adams’s sister, who had been dead nearly twenty-seven years. He had been in the District gaol upwards of fourteen months.

Adams put down his cup, with his left hand, and told the judge what he had told himself a great many times, at this table and at the desk upstairs, and had set down in the diary more than once, in the days when he could still set things down. The judge listened, and nodded, and did not argue. He said only that unless the District’s attorney moved further in the matter, the court might discharge William by its own order after November; and that the only other way he knew was an application to the Crown for mercy.

“And the Crown, in this city,” he said, gently, “is you.”

“Then that is a way I cannot take,” Adams said. “If my sister’s son is to have the Queen’s mercy, it must come to him as it comes to any other man in the District gaol, upon the advice of her ministers, and without a word from me. If I say a word, it is not mercy. It is favour. And I have spent five years in this house not doing favours.”

The judge said that he had supposed as much, and that he had thought it right to ask; and he finished his coffee, and went away down the Rise to his court, a small grey figure in the sun, with his hat in his hand. Adams watched him from the window until he was out of sight. Then he went upstairs, and sat down in the chair behind his own desk, which Mary had taken from him, and was angry for some time with nobody in particular, which was a thing he did well.

---

The morning was the presents.

The Imaum of Muscat, who was the sovereign of a great deal of the coast of Arabia and of Africa and of the islands between, and who had made a treaty with the Union seven years before and had evidently been pleased by it, had sent a ship to New York in the spring. She had come into the harbour at the end of April, the first ship of her kind that New York had ever seen, with an envoy aboard, and a cargo of coffee and dates and hides to sell, and, in the hold, presents for the sovereign of America: two horses of the Nejd breed, a gold-mounted sword, a carpet of Persia, a box of shawls, and a hundred and fifty pearls. The envoy was still in New York, being dined and shown the sights. The presents had come on to New Westminster in May, and had been lodged at Columbia Palace, because nobody could think where else to put them: the horses in the Palace stables, and the rest in a shuttered room on the ground floor, under the care of the housekeeper, who had never in her life had charge of anything worth stealing and had not slept properly since.

That was the difficulty. They were presents for the sovereign of America, which in the Imaum’s letter meant the Queen, and in the resolution now before the House of Commons meant the Treasury. The resolution proposed that the presents be accepted, and sold, and the proceeds given in equal parts to two charities of the city; and it would have passed on Tuesday without a word, if a member had not risen, after the previous question had been moved and there could be no debate, to ask whether anybody had ever asked the Crown. Nobody had. The House had sent the resolution back to its committee in some confusion, and it was to come up again this morning; and at nine o’clock a note had come up the Rise from the Executive Quarter, in the hand of one of the Prime Minister’s secretaries, asking, very civilly, whether the Governor-General could tell the Prime Minister whose the presents were.

He could not. That was the honest answer, and he spent the morning establishing it.

He had Mary bring down the books from the library, and the bound volumes of the Votes, and the Journal of the House of Lords American for the last thirty years, and he sat with them spread across the desk and the floor, turning the pages with his left hand, while she read him what he pointed at. There was very little. There had been a lion, five years ago, and two horses, which the Emperor of Morocco had given the consul at Tangier, and which the Commons had disposed of by a resolution that did not mention the Crown at all; the lion, he believed, had been sold. There had been a box of jewels from somebody, early in the century, of which the Journal recorded only that it had been received. There were swords and snuff-boxes and medals and a great many letters; and in all of it, as far as he could find, nobody had ever asked whether a present given to the Queen of America was the Queen’s own, as a lady’s presents were hers, or the Crown’s, to pass with the Crown to whoever came after her, or the Union’s, to be sold for the Treasury by a resolution of the House of Commons. Nobody had drawn the distinction, because nobody had expected it to matter. He could see why. A pair of horses and a box of pearls did not seem, on the face of it, a constitutional question. But he had lived seventy-two years and noticed that constitutional questions seldom did, on the face of them; they came in the shape of a lion, or a box of pearls, or a member rising after the previous question, and by the time anybody saw what they were, they had been answered.

At eleven he dictated his answer to the Prime Minister. It said that the Governor-General was not aware of any rule, and could not discover any precedent that settled the point, and would be obliged if Her Majesty’s ministers would advise him upon it before the House disposed of anything; and it said nothing else, because there was nothing else that it was his office to say. Mary wrote it out fair, and he signed it with his left hand, in the large unsteady letters that the clerks in the Executive Quarter had learnt in the last three weeks to take on trust.

Then he dictated a second letter, which was to the Queen.

It was not advice, and could not be. Her American ministers advised her, and her British ministers might not, and the Governor-General might only write to her, as he did every month, in letters that she was not obliged to answer and that nobody was obliged to obey. But the presents had been sent to her, and she had a right, he thought, to know that they existed; and so he told her. He told her about the ship, and the envoy, and the horses, one of them a bay and one a grey, which were said to be very fine and which he proposed to go and look at that day. He told her about the sword and the carpet and the shawls. He told her that there were a hundred and fifty pearls. He did not tell her that the House of Commons proposed to sell them, because that was not yet true, and might not become so, and was not in any case a thing for the Governor-General to report to the sovereign as if he were complaining of her Parliament. He ended by begging leave to assure Her Majesty of his most respectful and devoted duty; and Mary wrote it out fair, and laid it on the desk beside the other.

The other was the letter of eleven lines that had lain there since the eighteenth of May, acknowledging the Queen’s answer to the address of the Commons, in his secretary’s fair copy, waiting for his name. He had signed the three commissions and the warrant within the week, with his left hand, because the law required a signature and did not require a good one. He had not signed the letter. A Governor-General’s left hand was good enough for the law; he did not think it was good enough for the Queen. He looked at it now, and at the second letter beside it, and said that they would go together by the next steamer, and that he would sign them both before dinner, with his right hand, or not at all.

Mary did not say anything. She had stopped saying things about his hand some time ago.

---

At half past twelve he walked down the Rise.

It was the first time since the fall that he had gone out on foot, and Mary did not like it, and Louisa, when she heard of it, would like it less; so he did not tell Louisa. He took his stick in his left hand and his hat in his right, which was an experiment, and went down the hill in the glare with the dust coming up white from the road at every step, past the locust trees and the brick wall of the Palace kitchen garden, and in at the Palace gate.

The housekeeper met him in the hall, flustered and pleased, and took him into the shuttered room, and opened one shutter, so that a single bar of light came in across the floor; and there were the presents.

The carpet was unrolled on the boards, and it was more beautiful than he had expected, red and blue and the colour of old gold, with a pattern in it of flowers that were not any flowers he knew, going round and round inside one another without end. The shawls lay folded in their box. The sword lay on a table, in its scabbard, and he did not touch it. The pearls were in a casket of some dark wood, which the housekeeper unlocked with a key she wore round her neck on a ribbon, and they lay in the casket on a bed of faded silk, a hundred and fifty of them, as she told him, though she had never dared to count; and they were not white, as he had always supposed pearls were, but every colour that white could be, cream and grey and rose and the faint blue of skimmed milk, and they took the bar of light from the window and seemed to hold it.

He looked at them for a long time. He thought that they had come halfway round the world, from a sea he would never see, to a sovereign who would never see them either, and that they were lying in a shuttered room in an empty palace in a city that she had never visited, while the House of Commons decided whether to sell them; and that if he had been a younger man, or a poet, which he had once wished to be and fortunately was not, he would have made something of that. Then he thanked the housekeeper, and told her that she had done very well, and that she might sleep tonight, because nobody in New Westminster would know a pearl from a pea; and she laughed, and locked the casket, and he went out to the stables.

The horses were in the two end stalls, out of the sun. The groom brought them out into the yard, one after the other, and walked them up and down on the cobbles, and they were very fine, small and dense and quick, with their heads high and their nostrils wide, and they looked at the Governor-General of America as if he were a thing of very little importance, which he admired in them. The grey was the better of the two. The Queen was said to be a horsewoman, and to drive out every afternoon, and he thought that she would have liked the grey.

The clock over the stable arch struck one while the groom was walking it.

He went out by the front of the Palace, and stood for a while at the railings, at the top of the slope above the Axis, with his hat in his right hand and his stick in his left, getting his breath. Nobody was about. The Palace stood behind him with its shutters closed, as it had stood for forty-five years: built for a sovereign who was to have come every year or two, with no throne in it, because none had ever been installed. A cow was looking at him through the railings. In front of him the grass ran away east for more than a mile, shimmering, to the foot of Charter Hill; and at the far end of it Parliament House stood on its height in the heat haze, where the House of Commons was deciding, or not deciding, what to do with the Imaum’s horses.

He stood there for some minutes. Then he went back up the Rise, slowly, because it was very hot, and the arm had begun to ache.

---

He slept after that, in his chair, which he did not admit to, and woke at a little after three with his mouth dry and the house very quiet and the light gone yellow on the wall.

Mary had laid the two letters on the desk, side by side, with a clean pen, and a sheet of foolscap beside them for practice. He sat down in front of them, in his own chair, and took the pen in his right hand.

It would not close properly on the pen. He had known that it would not; he had been trying it, privately, every morning since Saturday, and it had not closed properly on any of them. He held the pen as well as he could between the thumb and the first two fingers, and wrote his name on the sheet of foolscap: John Quincy Adams. It went down the paper like a man walking on ice, as his hand had gone for years, but worse; and he looked at it, and wrote it again, and it was a little better; and again, and it was worse. He wrote it nine times. The ninth was not good, but it was legible, and it was his.

Then he drew the first letter towards him, the letter of eleven lines, and signed it at the foot, slowly, a letter at a time, with the whole of his attention; and blotted it; and drew the second letter towards him, and signed that.

The clock on the stairs struck four as he finished.

He sat back, and found that his forehead was wet, and that his hand was shaking more than it had shaken in the morning, and that he was absurdly pleased; and he called Mary, and showed her, and she said that it was very good, which it was not, and took the letters away to be sealed and made up for the mail to New York, to go by the next steamer to London, where the Queen, he supposed, would read them in July.

---

Louisa came down to dinner, which she had not done for a week, in her grey silk, with her cap very straight and her face very white, and said that she had heard that he had been walking about in the sun like a madman, and that she supposed he would be dead by Saturday, and that she hoped he had at least seen the horses.

He told her about the horses, and the carpet, and the pearls that were every colour that white could be. She listened with her chin on her hand. She had been born in London, sixty-five years ago, and had been married there, in the church of All Hallows by the Tower; and she had not been back for twenty-three years. She asked whether the London papers by the last steamer had said anything more about the Queen.

They had. They had been hinting since the spring, in the careful language that the London papers kept for such things, at what they called the Queen’s delicate condition, and by the last steamer they had stopped hinting. The Queen was to be confined in the winter. The papers had been very decorous about it, and very pleased, and the American papers had copied them, and the whole Union knew.

“Poor child,” Louisa said.

He looked at her. She was looking at her plate.

He knew what she meant, or some of it. He knew how many times his wife had been with child in the nearly forty-three years of their marriage, and how many of those times had ended in nothing, in a darkened room and a doctor’s face and a silence afterwards that neither of them broke; and he knew, because she had told him once, years ago, in a voice he had never heard her use before or since, that there had not been one of them that she did not still count. Four had been born living, and of the four, one was alive.

“She is young,” he said. “And very well looked after.”

“Yes,” Louisa said. “I expect she is.” And she asked about the grey horse again, and whether it was really as small as all that, and he told her.

---

In the evening Mary Louisa read to him, in the long room upstairs with the windows open, from a French book of travels in the East, because he had asked for something with Arabia in it; and the light went down slowly over the Axis, and the fireflies came out in the long grass below the Palace, hundreds of them, going on and off in the dark like the lights of a city that was not there. The mocking-bird was singing again. It sang half the night, in June, and nobody had ever discovered how to stop it.

At nine o’clock the household came in to prayers.

They came in as they came every evening, in no particular order, and stood or knelt where they generally stood or knelt: Louisa in her chair by the window, with her shawl; Mary beside her; Mary Louisa on the footstool, with her hands folded and one eye open; and the servants by the door, the cook and the two maids and the man who drove for him and the boy who did the boots, who had all of them been at work since five and would be again at five tomorrow, and who stood with their heads bowed and their faces turned a little away, as people do who are being prayed for by their employer and are not quite sure of the terms. Adams stood at the table with the Prayer Book open under the lamp, and read the collect for aid against all perils, and the general thanksgiving, as he did every night; and then, as he did every night, the prayer for the Queen.

He knew it by heart. He did not need to look at the page. O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lady, Queen Victoria; and so replenish her with the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that she may alway incline to thy will, and walk in thy way. Endue her plentifully with heavenly gifts; grant her in health and wealth long to live; strengthen her that she may vanquish and overcome all her enemies; and finally, after this life, she may attain everlasting joy and felicity; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

They said Amen. He was about to go on to the grace, when Louisa said from her chair by the window, not loudly, “And the child.”

He was silent for a moment. The Prayer Book had no form for it. It had a form for women after childbirth, and a form for the sovereign and for the royal family by name, and nothing whatever for a sovereign of twenty-one who was four months gone with her first child and three thousand miles away; and he had never in his life been easy praying in words that were not written down, since he could never be sure, when he made them up, that they were addressed to anybody but himself.

“And bless, we beseech thee, the child that she carries,” he said, “and give her a safe deliverance in her time, and joy of it; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.”

“Amen,” said the household, and Louisa loudest.

He read the grace, and they went away to bed, the servants first, by the back stairs, and then the women, Mary Louisa yawning on the landing and being told not to; and he stood for a while at the open window in the dark, with the fireflies below and the bird still singing, and took out his watch to wind it.

It was eleven minutes past nine. He had worked out the difference once, years ago, when he was the American minister at the Court of St James’s and had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon: the longitude of London, and the longitude of the Potomac, and the hours between them, which came to five and some minutes over. He had never forgotten it. He did not forget figures. It was nineteen minutes past two in the morning in London, and Thursday already, and the Queen, he supposed, was asleep.

He wound the watch, and put it away, and went up to bed.