The Other Thing

“It opens by hand,” said Alexander. “Nobody has motorised it. They asked in 1961 and the university said no.”

The observatory was on a low hill at the edge of the old town, in a park of bare trees with snow under them, a small round building with a dome of green copper gone almost black. They had walked up from the castle at half past ten through the snow with two officers from the Prussian guard a long way behind and Castellanos a shorter way behind them, and nobody had stopped them, because nobody in Königsberg expected the King of Prussia to be walking up a hill in the snow at half past ten at night the day after his coronation, with a cousin and a schoolfriend and a torch.

Nine degrees. The cold came through his gloves.

Inside, a round room, dark, with the telescope in the middle on its mount, brass and black iron, old, and a wheel on the wall with a handle. Alexander put his hands on the handle and turned it. Above them, with a long iron groan, a slot opened in the dome, and the sky came in through it, black, with stars.

“Bessel,” said Alexander. “Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. He built this. 1813.” He turned the dome a little on its rail, by hand, with a second handle, until the slot faced the north-west. “In 1838 he measured from this room the distance to a star. The first time anybody had. Before that nobody knew how far away any of them were. They thought they might be close. They thought they might be painted on something.” He bent to the eyepiece. “He measured it. Sixty-one Cygni. Ten light-years, he said. He was nearly right.”

Lukas had sat down on the floor with his back against the mount, in his plain black coat, his knees up, and was looking at nothing.

“1838,” said Frederick. “That’s the year Victoria was crowned.”

Alexander straightened up.

“Yes,” he said. “In London a girl of nineteen was crowned, and in Königsberg a man in a cold room found out how far away a star was.” He looked at Frederick. “I have always thought the second was more important. I am aware that I am the King of Prussia and should not say that.”

“Can I see it?”

Alexander moved aside.

---

It was not much. A point of light, very faint, orange-white, among other points of light, in the round black field of the eyepiece. Then, as his eye found it properly, two points, very close together.

“It is double,” said Alexander, beside him. “Two stars going round each other. Bessel did not know that, to start with. He thought it was one.”

Frederick watched the two points of light.

Ten light-years. Nearly right. A man in a cold room, a hundred and ninety-two years ago, who had not known whether the stars were painted on something, and had found out.

He stood back from the eyepiece. His eye watered with the cold.

Alexander had gone to the slot in the dome and was standing under it, looking up, with his hands in his coat pockets and his breath going up in the cold in a faint mist, the way the breath of nine hundred people had gone up under the vaults of the cathedral yesterday.

---

“I did not finish the letter,” said Alexander.

Frederick looked at him.

“On the second of May. The night before. In the observatory at Potsdam. I wrote the other thing I wanted to say is, and then I did not say it.” He did not look round. “I said I would write it the next week, when I had something to tell you that I had decided myself.” A pause. “Yesterday was the thing I decided myself. Charlotte. The bow. So now I can say the other thing.”

Lukas, on the floor against the mount, did not move.

“My great-great-grandfather,” said Alexander, to the sky, “was a man who wanted very much to be good at being Emperor. And he was. He was very good at it. He made speeches, and they were very good speeches, and people cheered, and he wore uniforms, and he rode horses, and he was very good at all of it. And then he was good at a war.” He was quiet for a moment. “My father was not good at it. He was ill. He was kind and he was ill, and he did very little, and the Empire was very grateful to him for doing very little. I did not understand that until he died.”

The stars in the slot of the dome. Very bright, in the cold.

“I am going to be good at it,” said Alexander. “I can feel it. Yesterday, in the cathedral, when I picked up the crown. I knew how to do it. I knew where to stand and how long to hold it and when to turn round. I knew what nine hundred people would do when I bowed, and they did it.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “That is what I wanted to say in May, and could not. That I am afraid of being good at it.”

Frederick waited.

“So.” Alexander turned round, at last, under the slot, with the stars behind his head. “The other thing. If I start to become him. If I start to be good at it in that way. I would like you to tell me.”

“Me?”

“Not Charlotte. She is my subject now, since yesterday morning, and a subject cannot say it, or not in a way I will hear. Not Mama. Not the Chancellor; he would like it. Not Lukas.” He looked down at the floor, at the boy against the mount. “Lukas would tell me, but he would only say it once, and he would say it so quietly I would not hear it, and then he would never say anything to me again, and I could not bear that.”

Lukas, on the floor, did not look up.

“You are the only one,” said Alexander. “You are my cousin and my equal and you live on the other side of an ocean, and you did it first. And you are not afraid of me, which nobody else in the German Empire under the age of sixty is.” He paused. “Will you?”

Frederick looked at him, in the dark, in the cold, under the slot in the dome.

To be consulted. To encourage. To warn. Bagehot, on a chair in the library at Columbia Palace. He had been allowed to warn once, about 1988, and had asked a Prime Minister whether he might say it twice. And now somebody was asking him for it. Not a Prime Minister. A cousin, sixteen, in a cold observatory, with a dictionary in his neck.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Once. I’ll only say it once.”

“Once is enough. If it is you.”

“And you’ll tell me.”

Alexander looked at him.

“If I start being good at it like that,” said Frederick. “In any of the fourteen. You’ll tell me.”

Alexander was quiet. Then his mouth moved at one corner, the way it did, the way Frederick’s father’s did.

“That is the arrangement,” said Alexander.

“That’s the arrangement.”

They did not shake hands. They were not the kind of people who did. Alexander turned back to the slot in the dome and put his hands in his pockets, and Frederick went back to the eyepiece and found the two points of light again, going round each other, ten light-years off, nearly right.

---

From the floor, against the mount, without looking up, Lukas said something in German.

Alexander went still.

“What did he say?” said Frederick.

Alexander did not answer at once.

“He said,” said Alexander, “I would have said it more than once.”

He turned round and looked down at Lukas on the floor.

Lukas looked back at him, for the first time that night, steadily, with his knees up and his back against the iron.

“Ich weiß,” said Alexander. I know. “Deshalb habe ich ihn gefragt.” That is why I asked him.

Lukas looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and went back to looking at nothing.

---

On Sunday night he was in the kitchen at nine, at the end of the long table, in the plastic chair, with a cup of cocoa he had made himself, and his father at the end of the table with tea, and Bridget at the sink with her back to them.

“How were the arrivals?” said Frederick. “On Friday.”

His father looked at him.

Then, slowly, deliberately, at Bridget’s back.

“Bridget,” said his father. “Read.”

“I know she read. How was it?”

His father considered.

“Slow,” said his father. A breath. “Lower. Down.”

At the sink Bridget did not turn round.

“I read them the way you serve soup, sir,” she said, to the window. “Slower, and from lower down. Somebody told me that once.” She turned the tap on. “He listened to all of them. Every one. And at the end he said a thing.”

“What thing?”

Bridget turned the tap off.

“He said again,” said Bridget. “So I did.”