Homage

The pages came back for the train.

Not the crimson. A new one, the gold mantle’s, shorter, heavier. He felt them take it at the four corners behind him as he stood up from the old chair with the crown on his head, and the weight of the whole of it settled, and he could not turn his head.

“To the throne, sir,” said Mr Tilney, at his elbow. “Down the steps. They go first.”

Off the sanctuary, down to the theatre: five steps, broad, shallow, of old stone. He could not see them. He could not look down in the crown. He stood at the top and waited.

The train went down before him. Four boys in scarlet and white, backwards, down five steps of stone in front of two thousand people and the cameras of fourteen realms, holding the end of a gold mantle level off the ground, without looking.

Hugo first, who had done it in September. Samir, counting under his breath, he could see his lips. Charlie Pike, who had fallen in rehearsal once on Friday and not since.

Theo.

Theo’s face was red to the ears. His eyes were fixed on the train in his hands, as Mr Tilney had told him, not on the steps. His heel went back and found the edge of the first step. Down. The second. His heel, feeling. Down.

The third.

His heel went back and did not find it. Frederick saw it: the very small check, the shoe with the silver buckle searching the air for the stone.

It found it.

Down. The fourth. The fifth. And Theo was on the floor of the theatre with the end of a gold mantle in his hands, level, and had not looked, and had not fallen, and his face did a small thing, and stopped doing it.

Frederick went down after him.

---

The throne.

On the theatre in the crossing, on a dais of its own, three steps up, gilded, high-backed, with a cushion. They lifted him into it: the Archbishop and the bishops and the peers who carried the swords, their hands at his elbows, as the order said, lifted up into the throne, which meant helped, and he sat, with the sceptres in his hands and the crown on his head, and looked down the nave.

A hundred and twenty-three yards. The west door. The light.

The Archbishop came up the steps of the dais and knelt in front of him.

That was in the order too. He had read it in large type in the library and in the Yellow Drawing Room and in a car. Then shall the Archbishop kneel before him. He had read it and he had not believed it, and now an old man in a cope of gold was on his knees on the step of the throne at his feet, and putting his hands together, and Frederick, as he had been shown, took the old man’s hands between his own, between the gloved one with the ring under it and the bare one.

“I, Archbishop of Canterbury, will be faithful and true, and faith and truth will bear unto you, our Sovereign Lord, and your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”

He let the hands go. The Archbishop kissed his right hand, and rose, slowly, a hand on the arm of the throne, and stepped back.

And then, in the order, the Princes of the Blood Royal.

There was one.

---

His father stood up.

On the south side of the sanctuary, in the front, in a chair with his name on it. Frederick could see him from the throne without looking for him, because from the throne you could see everything.

He did it the way he did everything now. The hands on the arms of the chair. The breath. The weight forward. A long moment in which nothing happened. Then up.

Niamh was beside him. She did not touch him. She put the black stick with the silver band into his right hand, and stepped one pace behind, and stayed there.

His father stood in a dark coat with the star of an order on it and the stick, eighty-two, white-haired, very straight, and looked across the sanctuary at the theatre and the throne and his son on it.

The abbey went still.

Not quiet. It had been quiet. Still, the way the gym at Franklin had gone still when the radio said San Francisco: two thousand people who had been told, all of them, by the newspapers and the order of service and the Household, that the Duke of Cumberland would do homage seated, by leave of the Archbishop, because of his health; and who saw him stand.

He walked.

The stick, forward, on the old floor of coloured stone. The right foot after it. The left. Slowly. A long way, for one step. The stick again.

Frederick did not count. He had the crown on and could not move his head and could not have looked away if he had wanted to, and he did not count.

Somewhere behind him on the theatre, very low, almost nothing, he heard somebody else counting. A woman’s voice. Irish. One pace behind his father.

Four.

The stick. The foot.

Five.

Across the sanctuary. Off the Cosmati pavement. To the head of the five broad steps down to the theatre, where Theo had just gone down backwards without looking.

His father stopped at the top of them.

The breath. Frederick could see it from the throne: the chest rising under the dark coat, and holding.

Then the stick on the first step down. And the right foot. And Niamh, one step behind, with her hand out, not touching.

Eleven.

Down. The second step.

Twelve.

He thought of a corridor on the sixth floor with a window at the end and four grey rubber feet. Ten steps. Abbey. Twenty. Practise. A ruler on a plan from a bookshop. Twenty yards, more or less, sir. A tap on stone at the far end of an empty nave, and a woman counting, and a voice at the west door saying don’t turn round.

Fourteen.

The theatre. Across it. The dais of the throne, three steps up.

His father stopped at the foot of the dais. The breath. The hold. Longer than at the top of the steps. His hand white on the silver band of the stick.

He did not kneel. He could not. He had leave not to. He put the stick on the first step of the dais, and his right foot, and came up it, and Niamh behind him with her hand out, and the second, and the third.

Twenty.

He stood on the step of the throne in front of his son and leaned on the stick and breathed.

---

He did not take Frederick’s hands. He could not let go of the stick. He looked at him instead, the long look, the reading one, from the crown to the shoes, all of it, the gold and the ring and the sceptres and the oil still in his hair.

And then the breath. And the hold.

And he said it.

“I,” said his father.

The breath.

“Ernest. Duke. Of Cumberland.”

Very slowly. Each word set down on its own, the way Lord Whitlock set words down on a table. Rough, low, quite clear, and it went up into the roof and came back off it, every word, a fraction late, so that the whole abbey heard it twice.

“Do. Become. Your liege man.”

The breath. Longer.

“Of life. And limb.”

Frederick sat on the throne and could not move and did not want to.

“And of. Earthly. Worship.”

His father’s hand on the stick was shaking now. Niamh did not move. The abbey did not move.

“And faith. And truth. Will I bear. Unto you.”

The longest breath of all. The lips trying the shape of it. Once. Again.

“To live. And die.”

Again.

“Against all manner. Of folks.”

And then, very quietly, nearly gone, the last of it:

“So help me. God.”

---

His father leaned forward, on the stick, slowly, as far as he could, and Frederick, without being shown, because it was not in the order that the King should, leaned down from the throne to meet him, crown and all, and his father touched the crown with his free hand, as the order said, one finger on the gold rim, and kissed him on the left cheek.

His father’s face was wet. So was his.

Then Niamh’s hand was at his father’s elbow at last, and two of the peers who carried swords had come, without anybody telling them, one on either side, and they turned him, slowly, and took him down the three steps of the dais and across the theatre and up the five steps to the sanctuary and back to the chair with his name on it, and he sat, and shut his eyes, and his mother’s hand went over and took his and held it, and did not let go.

In the north transept, somebody began to clap.

It was not in the order. Nobody claps in a coronation. But somebody in the north transept, square and grey in a morning coat, had begun, and then the whole of the north transept, and then the nave, and the south transept, and the peers in their coronets, all of them, two thousand people, for a man of eighty-two in a chair with his eyes shut, who had walked twenty yards and said one sentence.

The Archbishop let it go on. He stood by the throne with his hands folded in his gold cope and his face doing nothing, and let it go on, and on, and then lifted one hand an inch, and it stopped.

---

The rest went past him.

The peers came, one for each degree, and knelt, and said their words, and touched the crown, and went. He did not see their faces. The acclamation: God save King George, long live King George, may the King live for ever, all of them, again, and the trumpets. The sacrament, at the altar, which he took. Then St Edward’s Chapel behind the altar, a small dark room full of tombs, where they took the heavy crown off his head, at last, and he felt his neck again, and they took the gold mantle and put on him the purple, the Robe of Estate, lighter, velvet and ermine, and a different crown, smaller, lighter, with a great red stone in the front of it, which sat on his head like a hat and not like a cat.

Then the nave the other way.

Down it, from the altar to the west door, a hundred and twenty-three yards, in purple, with the orb in one hand and the sceptre in the other and the new crown on his head and the four of them at the corners of the train behind him, and the choir, and the trumpets, and two thousand people on both sides, standing.

Two-thirds of the way down, on the right now, the north side, under the window with the dog, three people standing very straight. Inspector Mensah had his cap under his arm still. His face was wet.

Frederick did not stop this time. He did not need to. He looked at them as he passed. That was all.

Round the black slab with its paper poppies, on the left.

The west door. The light.

---

The balcony was at six.

He had been told what it would be like and it was not like that. You came out of the tall windows onto a stone ledge with a balustrade, and below you there was a crowd, and you could not see the edges of it. It went down the Mall and round the memorial and up into the park and along every street that came into the square, and it was not people any more. It was one thing, very large, moving slightly, like the sea under a wing at night, and it made one sound.

His mother on his left. On his right, in a chair the Household had carried out and set at the balustrade, his father, in the dark coat, with a rug over his knees, who had said in five words in the corridor that he would stand on the balcony, and had been told by Niamh in two that he would not, and was sitting.

Overhead, from the east, very low, the aircraft came. Nine of them, red, in an arrow, with white smoke behind and then red and then blue, so low over the Palace that the windows behind him shook. And behind them, alone, slower, a grey one. A transport. The Royal Air Force’s. The type that would take him home on Monday.

It went over very low and dipped one wing.

He watched it all the way out over the park until it was gone.

---

Afterwards, inside, in the corridor behind the balcony room, with the robes off and his own coat on and the sound of the crowd coming through the walls like the generator at Franklin, he found his father in the chair at the end of the corridor, by a window, with Niamh, and his eyes shut.

They opened.

The long look.

“Papa.”

His father’s breath went in. The hold. A very small movement at the corner of his mouth.

“Twenty,” said his father. “Two.”

“Twenty-two?”

“Steps.” A breath. “Two. Extra.”

Niamh, behind the chair, said nothing, and her face did several things.

“I didn’t count,” said Frederick.

“No,” said his father, and shut his eyes again. “I. Did.”