Maundy

The list came from the Dean of Gloucester in March, in a long envelope, with a letter on top in a hand like copperplate and two sheets underneath, typed, each with seventeen names on it.

Your Majesty will be aware, wrote the Dean, that by ancient custom the Sovereign distributes the Royal Maundy on the Thursday before Easter to as many men and as many women as the Sovereign has years of age. Your Majesty will be seventeen on Maundy Thursday. We have accordingly been asked to find thirty-four recipients from the dioceses of the West, and have done so, and enclose the lists. They have each been nominated by their own parish for long service to their church and community. None of them has been told that Your Majesty knows their names.

He read the lists in the boot room, among the rugby boots.

Halfway down the second sheet, the women’s list, between a retired district nurse from Tewkesbury and a churchwarden from Stroud, it said:

Mrs Edith Haverfield, aged 99. Parish of St John the Baptist, Coln Saint Aldwyns. Nominated by the Parochial Church Council for eighty-one years’ service to the parish: flower rota, 1950 to 2019; Sunday school, 1952 to 1987; pancake race, winner, 1958 to 1989.

He read it three times.

He had not known her name was Edith.

---

He did not tell her. He did not tell anybody. He thought, from the way the Dean had written none of them has been told that Your Majesty knows their names, that this was the point: that you were nominated by your parish without being asked, and you went to the cathedral, and you sat in a row with thirty-three other old people in your best coat, and the King came along the row with the purses, and you did not know until he got to you whether he knew who you were.

He thought that Mrs Haverfield would want it that way. Then he thought that Mrs Haverfield had almost certainly known since March, because the Parochial Church Council of St John the Baptist, Coln Saint Aldwyns, consisted of the vicar, Sue Fennell, Mr Treadgold, and Mrs Dunning from the shop, and Mrs Dunning from the shop could not keep a secret from Mrs Haverfield for longer than it took to sell her a stamp.

---

Gloucester Cathedral was the largest building he had ever been inside that was not Westminster Abbey.

It was grey and enormous and very old and went up and up into a roof of stone ribs that fanned out overhead like the inside of a shell, and the light came down through tall windows full of glass so old that it had gone the colour of the sea in winter, and the whole of the great long nave was full, every seat, from the west door to the choir, with the people of Gloucestershire in their best clothes, sitting very still.

He walked up the nave with the Dean at a quarter to eleven.

He was not in robes. You did not wear robes for the Maundy, the Lord High Almoner had explained, in a letter, in February; you wore a morning coat, and you carried a small nosegay of flowers and herbs, which was a custom from the days when the Sovereign washed the feet of the poor and needed something to hold under his nose, and which had survived the washing of feet by about four hundred years. So he walked up the nave of Gloucester Cathedral in a morning coat with a nosegay of rosemary and thyme and something blue in his left hand, and the Yeomen of the Guard in front of him in their red and gold with dishes on their heads.

The dishes were on their heads.

He had read about it and had not believed it. The Maundy purses were carried in on great gold dishes, and the dishes were carried by Yeomen of the Guard, and the Yeomen carried them on their heads, balanced, one hand up to steady them, walking very slowly up the nave in step, the way women in old photographs carried water from a well. It was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen in a church. He had to look at the back of the Dean’s head very hard for the whole length of the nave so as not to think about it.

The thirty-four recipients were in the front rows of the choir, seventeen on each side, the men on the left and the women on the right.

He did not look at the women’s side as he came up. He had decided not to. He went up the steps into the choir and stood where the Dean showed him, and the service began, and there were prayers and a hymn and a lesson, the one about the Last Supper and the washing of the feet, if I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet, and then the Dean nodded to him, and he turned, and the Yeoman with the first dish came forward and lowered it from his head, with tremendous care, like a man taking off a crown, and held it out, and it was full of small leather purses, red and white, tied with leather thongs.

He went along the men’s side first.

They were old men. Retired farmers and retired schoolmasters and a retired postman and a man who had rung the bells at Cirencester for sixty-one years and a man who had run a scout troop in Cheltenham since 1971. Each of them stood up when he came, if he could stand, and some of them could not, and he gave each of them a red purse and a white purse, and said thank you, which was not in the order of service, and which the Dean had told him in the vestry was not necessary, and which he said anyway, to every one of them.

They did not say anything back, most of them. They took the purses and held them and looked at him. One of them, the bell-ringer from Cirencester, who was eighty-eight and had a face like a walnut, said, quite clearly, in the silence of the choir, I rang for your father’s coronation, and Frederick said I know, I read it, which was true, it had been on the list, and the old man’s face did something, and he sat down.

Then the women.

---

She was eleventh. Between the retired district nurse from Tewkesbury and the churchwarden from Stroud. In her coat, which he had seen every day since September, and a hat, which he had never seen, dark blue, with a small pin in it shaped like a bird, and her stick hooked over the back of the pew in front, and her hands in her lap in a pair of grey gloves.

She did not stand up.

He had not expected her to. She sat in the front row of the choir at Gloucester Cathedral with her chin up and her pale clear eyes looking straight ahead at nothing, at the great east window, at the stone, with an expression of the most complete and comprehensive indifference, as though she had been brought here against her will by some administrative error and intended to say so, in writing, afterwards.

He stopped in front of her.

The Yeoman held out the dish.

He took a red purse and a white purse and held them out to her.

She looked at them.

She did not take them. She looked at the purses in his hand, for some time, and then up at him, at his face, at the morning coat and the nosegay of rosemary and thyme and something blue, and then down again at the purses, and the whole choir, he could feel it, the Dean and the Yeomen and thirty-three other old people and the people in the nave behind who could see, waited.

“Edith,” said Mrs Haverfield. “Edith Haverfield.”

“I know,” said Frederick.

“You never knew my name.”

“It was on the list.”

“You never knew it till the list.” She looked at the purses. “Ninety-nine years. Eighty-one in that parish. Seventy years on the flower rota. Thirty-five years teaching the Sunday school. Thirty-one pancake races.” She looked up at him. “And the King of England never knew my name until a Dean sent him a list.”

“No,” said Frederick. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She was looking at him very steadily. “Your grandfather never knew it either. He asked me the way to Bibury and I told him and he said thank you very much and he never asked who I was.” She lifted her chin a little higher. “I didn’t mind. I was twenty. You don’t mind at twenty. I told the story every week for seventy-nine years and in the story he never asked my name, and that was the story.” She looked at the purses again. “Now you’ve got my name on a list.”

“Yes.”

“Say it,” said Mrs Haverfield.

He looked at her.

“Say my name,” said Mrs Haverfield. “Once. Out loud. In here. So it’s been said.”

The choir of Gloucester Cathedral was so quiet that he could hear the Yeoman beside him breathing.

“Thank you, Mrs Haverfield,” said Frederick. And then, because it was what she had asked: “Thank you, Edith.”

She looked at him for a moment longer.

Then she took the purses. A red one and a white one. She took them in her grey gloves and held them in her lap, together, and looked down at them, and did not say anything else at all, and he went on along the row, to the churchwarden from Stroud, and gave her her purses, and said thank you, and did not look back.

But at the end of the row, at the seventeenth, a very old woman in a wheelchair from Painswick who had been a midwife for fifty years, he glanced back, once, along the front row of the choir.

Mrs Haverfield was sitting with the purses in her lap, and her chin was down for the first time since September, and she was looking at them, and her shoulders were moving.

---

The coins in the purses were silver. Real silver, the Lord High Almoner had explained, a penny, a twopence, a threepence, a fourpence, struck every year for the Maundy and for nothing else, and their value as money was a few pence, and their value as anything else was a great deal more, and the red purse held an allowance for clothing that had once been clothing and was now a coin, and the white purse held silver pennies to the value, in pence, of the King’s years.

Seventeen.

At the New Inn that evening, at the table by the fire, Mrs Haverfield tipped out the white purse onto the table, and added them up, coin by coin, with her gloved finger, out loud, slowly, a four and a three and a two and a penny and so on round again, while the pub stood round and did not look.

“Seventeen,” said Mrs Haverfield.

She put them back in the purse, one by one, and pulled the thong tight, and put the purse in her handbag, and closed the handbag with a snap, and looked up.

“Next year he’ll be eighteen,” she said, to the pub. “There’ll be eighteen in it. For somebody.” She stood up. “But it won’t be me, and it won’t be him, because he’ll be in America.” She took her stick. “So these are the only seventeen there’ll ever be.” And went home.

---

Alexander came on Easter Sunday.

He came in a car from Heathrow with Lukas, having flown from Berlin on an ordinary aeroplane, which, Alexander said, getting out of the car on the gravel in front of Windrush in a long dark coat with his hands in the pockets, was the first time he had been on an ordinary aeroplane in his life and he did not intend it to be the last, because a woman in the seat beside him had given him half a sandwich.

“Half a sandwich,” said Alexander. “She didn’t know who I was. She said you look peaky, love, and gave me half her sandwich. Cheese and pickle.” He looked at Frederick. “What is pickle?”

“I don’t know. It’s brown.”

“It was delicious,” said the German Emperor and King of Prussia, with deep feeling, and then looked round at the valley, at the river and the willows and the village and the church tower and the long grey abbey with the clock, in the soft April light, with the lambs on the hill behind it, and stopped talking.

He was seventeen. He had been seventeen since January. He was taller than he had been at Königsberg, and thinner, and there was something in his face that had not been there when Frederick had last seen it, at the coronation, which Frederick recognised, because he saw it in the mirror. He had been King since he was fourteen. Since a morning in February three years ago when his father had died between one breath and the next. He wrote letters, in the diplomatic bag, every month, to his cousin in New Westminster, and his cousin wrote back, and nobody else in either Household had read a word of them.

Lukas got out of the other side of the car.

Lukas Brandt was six months younger than Alexander and a head shorter, round-faced, with glasses, and he was carrying a long black case under his arm, carefully, the way Mr Ferrante carried the map of 1779, and he said good afternoon to Frederick, in English, very formally, and then looked up at the sky over the valley, which was blue and clear with a few small high clouds, and said, in German, to Alexander, something that made Alexander laugh.

“What did he say?” said Frederick.

“He said the seeing will be excellent tonight,” said Alexander, “if the clouds go. He’s brought the telescope.” He looked at the long black case. “He brought it on the aeroplane. As hand luggage. They X-rayed it four times. A man at security asked him if it was a weapon and he said only against ignorance.” Alexander shook his head. “I nearly had to declare war on Heathrow.”

---

On Monday they went to Stratford.

To the theatre, on the river, which was red brick and enormous and full of schoolchildren, to see Hamlet. It had been Alexander’s idea. He had read it in German at eleven, in the Schlegel translation, the one every German child reads, and had read it in English at fourteen, in the month after his father died, and he wanted, he said, to see it in the town where the man who wrote it had been born, in his own language, to find out what I’ve been getting wrong.

They sat in the middle of the stalls. Frederick, Alexander, Lukas, Theo, who had come back from London on Sunday night with Niamh’s regards and a bag of the Palace’s shortbread. Castellanos and Kimura on the aisle. Two men from Alexander’s own detail, very large, German, who had clearly never been to the theatre and sat at the end of the row in the dark looking at the stage as though it might attack.

It was a long play. It was three and a half hours. Halfway through the first half, in the scene on the battlements where the ghost of the dead King comes to his son and tells him what happened, Alexander, beside Frederick, in the dark, went very still.

Frederick did not look at him.

The ghost on the stage said remember me, and went away, and Hamlet stood alone on the battlements in the cold blue light, a young man in black, about their age, and Alexander, beside him, in the dark, very quietly, under his breath, in German, said the next line before the actor did.

Not loudly. Nobody else could have heard it. Just under his breath, a beat ahead, the way Mr Treadgold sang the bass line half a beat ahead of everybody in the choir at St John the Baptist, as though he were trying to get to the end first.

The actor said it in English.

Alexander, beside him, let out a long slow breath in the dark.

“Schlegel’s better,” he said, very low.

“Is he?”

“No,” said Alexander. “But I read Schlegel first. In the month after. So Schlegel’s the one I hear.” He did not take his eyes from the stage. “It’s like your father’s trains. It’s not that they’re the best trains. It’s that they’re the ones he watched.”

---

In the interval, in the bar, which was full of schoolchildren eating ice cream, Alexander leaned against a pillar with a glass of orange juice and said, in a voice of great and terrible authority, to Lukas:

“He got it wrong.”

“Who did?”

“The man playing Hamlet. In the first scene with the ghost. The time is out of joint. He said it like a complaint. Like a man whose train is late.” Alexander drank some orange juice. “It’s not a complaint. It’s a diagnosis. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right. He’s not complaining that the time is out of joint. He’s realising that he’s the one who has to fix it.” He looked at the orange juice. “In Schlegel it’s obvious. Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen. You can’t say it like a complaint in German. The German won’t let you.”

Lukas looked at him through his glasses.

“You should write to the director,” said Lukas.

“I should,” said Alexander, and Frederick could see that he was going to.

A small girl of about eleven in a school uniform, eating an ice cream at the next pillar, who had been listening to all of this with her mouth open, said, to Alexander, in a broad Birmingham accent:

“Are you a teacher?”

Alexander looked at her.

“No,” said the German Emperor.

“Then how do you know?”

Alexander considered the question with great seriousness.

“I had to learn it,” he said, “very quickly, when I was fourteen.”

The small girl looked at him for a while.

“Was it for an exam?” she said.

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Sort of.”

“Did you pass?”

Alexander looked at Frederick. Frederick looked at Alexander.

“We’ll see,” said Alexander, and the bell went for the second half.

---

On Tuesday Jack took them to the nets.

The indoor nets, in Cirencester, in a sports centre on the edge of the town, a long hall with a green floor and three lanes of netting hung from the ceiling, where the village side practised in the winter, and where Jack had promised, in September, in a lane above the school, at the top of his voice, NETS! NOVEMBER!, and where he had taught Frederick, every Saturday from November to March, to bowl, and where Frederick had been, every Saturday from November to March, properly rubbish.

Jack had been told that the German Emperor was coming. He had been told by Frederick on Sunday night, at the New Inn, at the bar, and had put down the glass he was drying and said the WHAT, and Frederick had explained, and Jack had said your cousin is the Emperor of GERMANY, and Frederick had said and King of Prussia, and Jack had looked at him for a long time and then said, slowly, does he know what cricket is, and Frederick had said no, and the grin had come up all at once, enormous, from the bottom, and Jack had said, right.

So on Tuesday Jack stood in the middle lane of the indoor nets in Cirencester with a red ball in his hand and looked at Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, in a borrowed white sweater from the village side’s kit bag, standing at the end of the lane with his hands in his pockets and an expression of mild intellectual curiosity.

“Right,” said Jack. “Arm straight. Straight. You can’t bend it. Run up. Bring the arm over the top. Let go at the top. Don’t throw it. Bowl it.” He held out the ball. “You’ll be rubbish.”

Alexander took the ball.

He looked at it. He turned it over in his hands, feeling the seam with his thumb, the way Lukas had held the black telescope case. He looked down the lane at the stumps at the far end, and at Mr Ellis, who had come because Jack had asked him to, and was standing at the crease in pads, with a bat, like a heron.

“Straight,” said Alexander.

“Straight.”

“Over the top.”

“Over the top.”

“And release at the top.” Alexander nodded slowly. “It’s a lever,” he said. “The arm. It’s a lever with a fixed fulcrum at the shoulder. You’re not allowed to use the elbow because the elbow would give you a second fulcrum and the ball would be too fast.” He looked at Jack. “Is that right?”

Jack looked at him.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“Ah,” said Alexander, and walked back down the lane eight paces, and turned, and ran up, and brought his arm over the top, perfectly straight, like a lever, and let go at the top.

The ball went down the lane, hit the green floor about two yards in front of Mr Ellis, jumped off it sideways, past the edge of the bat, and knocked the middle stump clean out of the ground.

There was a silence in the indoor nets.

Mr Ellis looked down at the stump, lying on the green floor behind him.

Jack stood in the middle of the lane with his mouth open.

“Was that right?” said Alexander, in German, to Lukas, at the side of the net.

“I think so,” said Lukas. “He’s making a face.”

“Is it a good face?”

Lukas looked at Jack.

“No,” said Lukas.

---

Alexander bowled for an hour. He took Mr Ellis’s wicket four times. He did not seem to find this remarkable. He went back down the lane after each ball, eight paces, and turned, and ran up, and bowled, perfectly straight, like a lever, with an expression of mild intellectual satisfaction, as though he were checking a proof, and every so often, when the ball did something, he said ah, and once, when it went off the edge of the bat and into the side netting, he said interesting, and Jack, standing at the side of the net with his arms folded and his face going slowly redder and redder, said nothing at all for the whole hour, which was the longest Frederick had ever known him to be silent in the presence of anybody.

At the end of it Mr Ellis came down the lane with his bat under his arm and his pads on and stood in front of Alexander and looked at him.

“You’ve never done that before, lad,” said Mr Ellis.

“No.”

“Never at all.”

“I’ve never seen it,” said Alexander. “I read about it last night. In the New Inn. There was a book on the shelf by the fire. Wisden, 1987.” He thought about it. “I read about four hundred pages.”

Mr Ellis looked at him for a long time.

“If you lived here,” said Mr Ellis, “I’d have you in the first eleven by June.”

“I’m the German Emperor,” said Alexander apologetically.

“Aye,” said Mr Ellis, with deep regret. “That’s the trouble.”

Behind them, at the side of the net, Jack Fennell unfolded his arms, and walked down the lane to Frederick, who had been sitting on the bench at the side for the whole hour with Theo and Lukas, watching, and stood in front of him.

“Six months,” said Jack. “Six months I’ve been teaching you. Every Saturday. In this net. And you’re still rubbish. And he comes in from Germany and reads a book and takes Ellis’s middle stump in his first ball.” He looked down the lane at Alexander, who was now explaining something about levers to Mr Ellis with his hands. “I hate him,” said Jack, with tremendous warmth. “I absolutely hate him. Can he come back next year?”

---

On Wednesday night, at midnight, Lukas took them up onto the wold.

It was clear. The clouds had gone in the afternoon, as he had said they would, and the night was cold and still and very dark, because there were no towns up here, no lights for miles, nothing but the walls and the fields and the clumps of trees, and when they came out at the top of the lane above the school onto the open wold, in their coats, with Jack leading, because Jack knew the way in the dark, and Frederick behind him with the map in his pocket that he did not need, and Alexander and Lukas and Theo behind them, and somewhere behind all of them, very quietly, three people from two different detachments who had agreed among themselves not to be seen, the sky opened.

He had never seen it.

That was the thing he thought, standing at the top of the lane with his head back. He had lived his whole life in cities, in the Columbia District under the glow of the dome and the Monument and the Axis, where you could see the moon and two stars and an aeroplane. He had been at sea, once, at night, and had not been looking up. He had never seen it like this. The whole sky, from one edge to the other, full. Thousands. Tens of thousands. So many that the dark between them was not dark but grey, a soft grey glow like dust in a beam of light, and across the middle of it, from one side of the wold to the other, a long pale ragged river of light, like smoke, like breath on a cold window, going right across the sky.

“Die Milchstraße,” said Lukas, quietly, beside him.

“The Milky Way,” said Alexander.

Nobody else said anything. Not even Jack.

Lukas set up the telescope. He did it in the dark by feel, on the grass, by the wall, the three legs of the tripod and the long black tube, very carefully, the way Theo put strips across a cut eyebrow, and then he crouched down beside it and looked through the small eyepiece at the side and moved it, very slowly, a little way, and a little way more, and then stopped, and stood up, and stepped back.

“Jupiter,” said Lukas.

He looked at Frederick.

Frederick bent and looked through the eyepiece.

It was there. In the middle of the black. A small, perfect, pale gold disc, not a point of light, a disc, round, with two faint brown stripes across it like the bands on a marble, and on either side of it, in a line, so small and so bright and so exactly in a row that they looked as though somebody had placed them there on purpose with tweezers, four tiny points of light.

“Those are its moons,” said Lukas. “Galileo saw them in 1610. He was the first. He thought they were stars. Then he looked again the next night and they had moved.” He was quiet for a moment. “Everybody who looks through a telescope at Jupiter for the first time sees exactly what Galileo saw. The same four. In a line. Nobody who has ever lived has seen anything different.”

Frederick looked at the four small points of light beside the gold disc for a long time.

He stood up. He gave the eyepiece to Jack.

Jack bent and looked through it.

He did not say anything. For a long time. Longer than at the crossroads. Longer than in the lambing shed. He bent over the eyepiece of Lukas Brandt’s telescope on the top of the wold above Coln Saint Aldwyns at midnight in April with his hands on his knees and looked at Jupiter and its four moons, and did not move, and did not speak, and Frederick, standing beside him in the dark under the river of light, could hear him breathing.

Then Jack stood up.

He looked at Lukas.

“Four hundred and twenty-one years,” said Jack.

Lukas looked at him through his glasses in the dark.

“1610,” said Jack. “Galileo. That’s four hundred and twenty-one years. I did it in my head.” He looked up at the sky, at the whole of it, at the river of light going across from one side of the wold to the other. “I’ve lived in this valley my whole life. Eighteen years. I’ve been up here at night a hundred times. Walking Nan’s dog. Coming back from the pub.” He kept looking up. “And I never once looked.”

Nobody said anything.

“Nobody ever showed me,” said Jack, to the sky.

Lukas Brandt, sixteen, the German Emperor’s oldest friend, who had a category of his own in the German Household because no category had existed for a private friend of the sovereign, and who said, Alexander had written once, one thing an evening and would have said it more than once, stood beside his telescope on the top of an English hill in the dark and looked at Jack Fennell for a long time.

“Now somebody has,” said Lukas.

---

They walked back down at two in the morning, the five of them, in the dark, with the telescope in its case under Lukas’s arm, and Jack leading, not talking, which was the most remarkable thing that had happened all week, and Alexander falling into step beside Frederick at the back.

“He’s very loud,” said Alexander, in German, quietly, nodding at Jack’s back.

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t say anything for an hour in the nets. Because I was better than you. He was angry for you.” Alexander walked for a while. “And he didn’t say anything for ten minutes at the telescope. Because he’d never been shown.” He put his hands in his pockets. “He’s only quiet when something matters.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I’m going to write to you about him,” said Alexander. “In the bag. In May. A proper letter.” He looked up at the sky, which was still full, over the trees above the school. “At the coronation I asked you to tell me if I ever became one of them. One of the ones who forgets.” He walked a few more steps. “You’ve never had to. So I’m telling you instead. You haven’t either. I want to put that in writing. So you have it.” He was quiet for a moment. “You haven’t forgotten anything. You’ve found something.”

They came down the last field to the gate above the school.

At the gate, Jack, at the front, stopped, and turned round in the dark, and looked back up the field at the four of them coming down, and then up, past them, at the sky over the wold.

“NEXT YEAR,” said Jack, at the top of his voice, at the stars, so that a sheep somewhere on the far side of the valley woke up and said something about it. “I’m going to LOOK.”