Book Nine: Junior Year Part Two: Westminster Characters
Chapter Sixteen
Behind the Screen
Frederick. Westminster Abbey. Saturday, 17 November 2029.
It is not a coronation, does not replicate Westminster, and confers nothing: the monarch's authority passes at the death of the predecessor and the service records rather than creates it.
They took the crimson off him at the altar.
Mr Tilney’s hands at the clasp at his throat, and then the weight lifting, the person who had been leaning on him since eight standing up and stepping away. He felt cold at once, through the white.
The four of them gathered the robe. He did not see them do it. He heard it: a long soft sound of velvet folding on itself, and Mr Tilney’s voice very low, front to back, Mr Pike, front to back, and four pairs of shoes on the old stone going away to the side of the sanctuary.
He stood at the altar in a plain linen tunic to the ankle, sleeveless, the lightest thing he had ever worn, in front of two thousand people and the cameras of fourteen realms, and was more nearly nobody than he had been since he was born.
Then the chair.
He sat in it. Old brown wood, the arms worn smooth, the initials of eighteenth-century schoolboys at his back. The stone under him in its box. The altar in front.
The four poles went up round him. He saw them come: four men in dark blue velvet robes with white plumes, Knights of the Garter, old men, one at each corner, each with a pole, and between the tops of the poles a canopy of gold cloth that came down over his head and closed the light out above him.
Then the screen. Panels of heavy embroidered gold, carried in from the side and set on their frame round the chair, on three sides, and the fourth side the altar.
The abbey went away.
It was small inside. Smaller than he had thought. Gold above, gold on three sides, the altar in front, and in the space between, close enough to touch, the Archbishop, and the Dean beside him holding something, and the four old men’s arms going up past the edges of the gold to hold the poles.
It was very quiet. Not silent: through the embroidery, muffled, the choir had begun. Zadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet, anointed Solomon king. Strings first, rising, a long way off, the way the knocking had come down the lobby on Charter Hill. Then the voices all at once. He heard them as if through a wall.
Inside, nobody spoke.
The Dean held out the thing in his hands. A small gold vessel shaped like a bird, an eagle, with its wings folded. The Archbishop took a spoon, small and old and gold, and the Dean tipped the eagle, and something ran into the spoon from the beak, clear, catching the light from somewhere.
The Archbishop turned to him.
“Hands,” he said. Very quietly. The only word of instruction.
Frederick held them out, palms up.
The oil was cold.
On the right palm, a cross, drawn with a thumb. On the left. Cold, and thick, and smelling of something he did not know: oranges, and roses, and something like the inside of an old church in summer.
Oil. Cold.
“Breast.”
The Archbishop’s thumb at the neck of the linen, where it opened, on the skin over his breastbone. Cold.
“Head.”
He bowed his head.
The spoon again. The cross on the crown of his head, in his hair, with the thumb, and the oil cold on his scalp, and then, without his expecting it, the Archbishop’s hand stayed. The whole hand. Flat on his head, the palm and the fingers, warm, heavy, not pressing, simply there, as if to keep something from blowing away.
And the words, very low, close, for nobody else:
“Be thy head anointed with holy oil, as kings, priests and prophets were anointed.”
He did not hear the rest. He heard it and did not hear it.
It was dark and close and gold and he was very small inside it, and there was a hand on him, and he had been here before.
Under a house on Twenty-Second Street, on his front in the dust, with the timbers crossed above him like a pair of scissors, and a hand in the dark that had turned over and taken hold of his and not let go for twenty-two minutes.
Then not.
The oil was not cold now. It had gone warm on his palms and his chest and his head, the way water goes warm in your hands if you hold it. He had not noticed it change.
Then not alone.
He sat in the old chair with his oiled palms open on his knees and his head bowed under the Archbishop’s hand inside a box of gold, with the choir coming through the embroidery from a long way off, God save the King, long live the King, may the King live for ever, and was not, for the length of the anthem, anybody at all except a person somebody had their hand on.
The hand lifted.
“Amen,” said the Archbishop.
He did not tell anybody. He decided it inside the screen, before it came down. Not his mother, not Theo, not anybody who wrote anything down. Not because it was a secret. Because it had been said to him and not to anybody else.
The screen came down.
The light came back all at once, and the noise of two thousand people breathing, and the cameras, which he had been told were in the triforium and could see everything except the inside of the screen.
They dressed him.
The Dean and two others: the long coat of gold, stiff, the supertunica, over the linen, sleeves pinned at the wrist where Mr Hawes had pinned them in the library at home. A girdle. Then the gold spurs, which they did not put on him, only touched to his heels, one and then the other, and took away. Then the sword, which the Archbishop put into his hands, and he held it, and went to the altar and laid it there, and a peer came forward and paid for it with a bag of coins, a hundred shillings, and took it back, as had been done since nobody knew when, so that the sword was the realm’s and not the King’s.
The bracelets of gold on his wrists, one and then the other. The robe of gold cloth over everything, the mantle with the eagles and roses and thistles and shamrocks, heavy as a person, his father’s and his grandfather’s and nine others’.
The orb. Gold, with a cross on top, heavier than it looked, placed in his right hand, and then taken back and laid on the altar, because he would need the hand.
The ring. On the fourth finger of the right hand. It went on over the oil, a little stiffly, and stayed.
A glove on the right hand, white, embroidered, over the ring.
The sceptre with the cross, in the right. The rod with the dove, in the left.
He sat in the old chair with a sceptre in each hand and gold to the floor and his head bare and oiled, and the Archbishop went to the altar and took up the crown.
He had seen it in pictures all his life. It was smaller than in the pictures, and heavier. Gold, solid, with arches, and a purple cap inside, and ermine at the rim, and stones, hundreds, of every colour, catching the light from the high windows.
The Archbishop held it up. Very high, over his own head, and held it there, so that everybody in the abbey could see it, and the abbey made a sound, very low, not words.
Then he came down the step and stood in front of the chair, and lowered it.
Frederick did not shut his eyes. His father had not.
It came down onto his head.
The weight. Not like the robe; nothing like the robe. A robe leaned on you. This sat. Square and straight and very heavy on the top of his skull, about what a cat weighed, Mrs Ashdown had said, a large one, and it did not move, and he knew at once why every picture of every King in a crown showed him sitting very still.
“God save the King,” said the Archbishop.
And the abbey answered.
Not the Recognition. Not God save King George, four sides, in order. All of it, all at once, every voice, two thousand of them, from the sanctuary and the transepts and the whole length of the nave and the three under the window and the north transept loudest of all:
“GOD SAVE THE KING.”
The peers in the south transept put their coronets on, all together, with a sound like rain starting. The trumpets. Somewhere above in the triforium, very high and very bright, more trumpets.
And then, a long way off, through the walls and the stone and the noise, so faint he thought at first he had imagined it, down on the river at the Tower, a gun.
Then another.
He sat in the old chair with the crown on his head and the sceptres in his hands and did not move, because you could not move in it, and listened to the guns on the river, one at a time, a long way off, the way you listen to a train you know the time of.
On the south side of the sanctuary, in the front, in a chair with her name on it, his mother. He did not look.
Beside her, his father.
He did not look.
He knew.