by Mark Helprin
For hours Freddy stared out the window and down at the sea. Sometimes he saw ships, which from forty thousand feet seemed the size of paperclips, and he believed he could know, and perhaps he could, when they were British. No one interrupted him: not Paul, who might in other days have ordered him to read a particular article or chapter; not his sister, whose company he loved; not his brother, who had now to experience briefly some of the madness of being next in line; not the stewards and retainers, who dared not serve lunch until Freddy gave some sign that he was ready. When he had been the Prince of Wales, people interposed themselves to ask if he wanted a cup of tea, to tell him that such and such a person had arrived, to ask how he wanted his steak cooked. Not now: they did not know him yet, and were far more tentative—except for Fredericka. Only she could come to him without inhibition. Only she had not had to adjust to his elevation.
Paul watched her as she settled into the seat next to Freddy, and was moved, for he remembered how he had been the only person in the world who could sit in comfort and nonchalance next to Philippa. He had been the only one who could sneak up behind her and grab her waist so as to tickle her into an explosive shriek. To see Fredericka, in her extraordinary grace and beauty, next to the king, his son, made him feel that all things were rightly taking their place.
How miraculous, in the modern age, that the eternal beauties were not overwhelmed. The plane roared quietly through ragged skeins of cloud pressed into slipstream and contrail, the pale blue patches of sky pulsing through gates of mist. West of the Gulf Stream the aircraft wheeled south, mitres of sunlight tracking across the cabin floor like a moving compass card. Everything west and to the right was America, a solid line where the sea stopped at the coastal plain in a purplish haze two thousand miles long. Freddy turned to Fredericka and took her right arm. In anticipation of the warm air of St Rose, she was wearing a sun dress, and her arms and shoulders were bare. He kissed her hand, and looked back out the window. Then, turning to her once again, he said, “We made only one thin line perpendicular to that coast, and it went three thousand miles deep. Imagine how many more we could have made along the entire length, and think of the power and rhythm of the ceaseless turning of that country, like a great engine, its cities jewelled bearings, their lights and fires shining like beacons into space.”
She nodded, for she had seen it.
“I’m glad we were there,” said the king, and for the more than two hours that they flew parallel to the purple coast, he did not take his eyes from it.
FOR BANNERMAN, the king’s falconer and an earl, rising up into Scotland, whence he had come, was like ascending to heaven. For he believed that in Scotland each moment was a credit to life. When the cold wind drove the rain into your face, that was. When the clouds skidded by above so fast they were like an army of kilted soldiers, that was. When the sky over the sea moved from grey to gold, that, too. Just standing on a heather-covered plateau with the world dove-coloured for as far as the eye could see, and nothing but the wind for twenty miles or more, was so good a thing and so beautiful that one knew that if one were there to die it would be in fullness. This was how it was for Bannerman, who took the charge of life from wind and smoke.
In the smallest and poorest stone house in the hills above Kilmuir, he found the boy Craig-Vyvyan’s father, who would not have been home only a few days before, but who had brought his sheep down just then and was sitting on his step, face burning from weeks in the wind, and a little whisky. As Bannerman approached—an extraordinary figure in his fine Scottish garb—Mr Cockaleekie rose. “May I introduce myself?” Bannerman asked. “I am Joseph Sussingham Bannerman, Earl of Dalnessie, Falconer to the King, looking in behalf of His Majesty for Craig-Vyvyan.”
Mr Cockaleekie looked Bannerman over. Had he a pipe he would have taken a puff. “So,” he said, “he’s not mad after all.”
“The king?”
“Craig-Vyvyan. We thought he was daft. It woulda been one thing had he just told that story once and been done with it. No one believed him. Would you? We woulda forgot it in a week: he’s just a lad. But he kept at it, he did. Said he had to prepare. Said the Prince of Wales told him to. Taught himself to read thick books.” Mr Cockaleekie’s eyes rolled heavenward.
“Did he?”
“He did. For two years now we’ve not been able to shut him up. History of this, history of that; figures of trade; geography of England; geography of the world; started to study Latin; started to study—good God, man—Greek. He has a book,” Mr Cockaleekie said, holding his right hand up and sticking out the little finger, “that tells him how to hold a teacup and a fork, and how you go about having dinner with the queen.”
“Good lad,” Bannerman said.
“Lost a dozen sheep because he was staring at books.”
“It may be, sir, that his loss will be made up, and then some.”
Mr Cockaleekie bobbed his head in hope. “It was my loss, anyway, but he isn’t here. He went to work in the library at Waterstein.”
“Waterstein?” Bannerman asked. “Is that in bloody Germany?”
“No, it’s not in bloody Germany, it’s on Skye, as far west as you can get.”
Which library, of whitewashed stone, and one room, at the edge of the Sea of the Hebrides, Craig-Vyvyan was about to close up when Bannerman burst through the door and, after his eye had fastened upon his prey, said, “I’ve found you.”
“I learned to read and write,” Craig-Vyvyan told him in near shock, pushing back against his chair as he sat behind the other piece of furniture in the room, a long table. “It took three days,” he said, still amazed, “and then I was reading almost as fast as I can run. Before, it was one word at a time.”
“Excellent,” said Bannerman, stepping into the yellow light that came, somehow, from a student lamp with a green globe. “That’s what you were supposed to have done.”
“I’ve read three hundred books,” Craig-Vyvyan announced, still amazed. “I know about England, I know about France, I know about the world.” He stopped to reflect. “Your lordship,” he said, picking his words carefully, “I know about time.”
“Well then, that’s it, Craig-Vyvyan,” Bannerman said, “for a man who knows about time will be pressed into being an educated man, or perhaps it’s vice versa, I’m not sure myself. Get your things. Tomorrow at noon, in the Forest of Balmoral, we’ll stand with the king at the summit of Lochnagar.”
“We,” repeated Craig-Vyvyan, as a squall peppered the sea.
And Bannerman replied, “He hasn’t forgotten, as kings often do. Not this one.”
LOCHNAGAR WAS COVERED with snow. Though Bannerman drove as far as he could go on the inner roads, getting to the summit would be an ordeal. They had driven through the night and were tired and unshaven, but they eagerly put on military cold-weather parkas and snowshoes, and shouldered packs. Having retrieved the tiercel falcon Craig-Vyvyan from Balmoral Castle half an hour before, Bannerman removed him from a cage in the back of the Land Rover.
“How can you carry him, with your arm up, all the way to the top?” Craig-Vyvyan asked, looking at the mountain, rose-coloured in the light of dawn and crowned by mists of snow tossing in the wind.
“The frame,” Bannerman said, placing a frame between his waist and arm.
“And the king?” Craig-Vyvyan asked, looking at his hooded and restless namesake on the arm of the huge earl.
“The king?” Bannerman asked in return.
“Where is he?”
“The king set out a week ago in heavy snow, and I assume he has been walking ever since. He was to have made a circuit of the mountains and glens, and probably he has walked two hundred miles and not seen a soul or been inside a building in all that time. But he will come to the summit of Lochnagar at noon, because he said he would.”
“And what will he be like when he gets there?” Craig-Vyvyan asked somewhat apprehensively.
“What will he be like?” Bannerman echoed. “He won’t be like us. He’ll arr
ive clean-shaven, having moved heaven and earth to make a fire in the snow, to heat the water. He will have washed his clothes. He will look, despite seven days in the wilderness, like an officer on parade. He will have strained as we have never strained, carrying the burden of the whole country and its history. And he will have carried, its weight far heavier than any gear a soldier has ever carried, his reputation as a madman and an idiot. For a person of honour, that is a difficult thing indeed. He will not be like us, Craig-Vyvyan, because he is the king of England, and no matter what anyone may say, no matter what you may hear, no matter what the law or what his fate, that still means something.”
They began the climb in the dawn-light from the north, on the palace side, as the king, they trusted, climbed toward them from the south. They did not know that throughout the morning Fredericka watched from a south-facing window at Balmoral as they made their way. She did not care that Freddy would come back to her fully confirmed, but only that he would come back. And she did not hope that Craig-Vyvyan would fly, and thereby open a new chapter. She hoped instead for whatever might be. Of late she had discovered that when others prayed to God to save the king, her husband said his own prayer, that God would favour that which was right. So it was, when she stayed in a high room and looked out at Lochnagar as it brightened in the sun, that she prayed for the right.
The higher Bannerman and the boy climbed, the brighter the world became. And the higher they rose, the more the falcon stirred, something within him waking with the altitude. “Look at him,” Bannerman said as the boy Craig-Vyvyan bent to retie one of his snowshoes. “He’s edgy be-cause he loves the air. All my life I have taken care of falcons, and I will tell you this. The closer to heaven they rise, the happier they get. They understand that when they go very high something changes in the world and in them. I have seen them, a minute speck that you can hardly keep in sight, twirling in the blue, and I am convinced that this is what they live for.”
The way they came was such that they could see neither the flat of the summit nor the more luminous and warmer south beyond the rim they were soon to crest. In the last half hour of the climb they moved at a heated pace, all forces in balance, delighting in the effortlessness of their effort, taking cues from the falcon as he thrust his head up or from side to side to smell the wind. The thin crest of the summit, backlit by the sun, was crowned in every blast of wind by glassy sprays of gold and white. Just to reach such a summit in the snow drew them on, but to know that, a little beyond it, the new king would be waiting, propelled them like birds on the wind.
When they crossed the rim, the falcon lifted his wings as if to catch the air, but then settled back, restless still. The boy, who now knew something of the great history of Britain, was moved by what he saw. For standing on a broad patch of snow, looking south over lands as far as he could see, was their king.
Bannerman had been right. Seven days or not, Freddy’s uniform and parka were clean and crisp. He himself was clean and clean-shaven, every patch and badge level and shining, a tie knotted perfectly at his neck, showing through to the air where his jacket lay slightly open and luffing in the breeze. Even his pack, at some remove, was filled, balanced, and neatly closed. These were the kind of details to which he had attended all his life. But the best of them was the way he stood, without any self-consciousness but as straight and tall as in an ancient story of a king standing on top of a mountain. The greatness that Craig-Vyvyan and Bannerman felt flooding in came not from Freddy himself, who was, after all, only Freddy, but from what Freddy saw. They could tell from his eyes that he was looking over things, both visible and invisible, that they might not themselves have seen. The sky outstretched before him was only blue, but for him the idea of England was as legible in it as if it had been hanging there like an ornament. When his eyes fixed on what might have seemed to some to be nothing, it was only because the eyes of the king were fixed on constellations in daylight. This was the royal task, which he was discovering in that very moment.
They approached the sovereign of all the isles of Great Britain, which is to say Freddy, and Bannerman made a little bow.
“Bannerman,” said Freddy.
“Your Majesty.”
“You’re late.” Bannerman understood the tone in which this was said, although the boy Craig-Vyvyan did not at first.
“Sir,” Bannerman said.
“And you, Craig-Vyvyan, you came,” Freddy said to Craig-Vyvyan the boy.
“Your Majesty the King asked me to.”
“You were a little vague on that before, as I remember.”
“I’ve been reading, sir. I know how to hold a teacup.”
“Good,” said Freddy. “Otherwise it’s hard to get the tea into your mouth. Have you read Gibbon?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Carlyle?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Yeats?”
“Who?”
“You’ll have to get to him. And what do you think of the others?”
“I love them, sir. They have lifted my heart into another world.” This was so true in the way the boy said it that it virtually rang through Bannerman and the king, for Craig-Vyvyan’s transformation was itself a coronation, and his elevation into that other world was something close to what happens to a king when at last he takes on his responsibilities.
“I promised you Strathcoyne,” Freddy told him, “and though in my absence my mother gave it away, the quiver is not empty. It’s fuller than I had known, and should your namesake fly we will pull out for you a very good arrow indeed.”
“Even if it were nothing, sir, it would be all right,” Craig-Vyvyan said.
“It won’t be nothing,” Freddy assured him.
He turned slowly to Bannerman, as if to say, “Let’s begin.” Craig-Vyvyan, now a spectator only, became appropriately silent and moved back a few feet.
Freddy met the eyes of the falcon. Four other times he had done so. Once he had been afraid. Next he had been anxious. Then he had been arrogant. And then he had been puzzled. Now, for the first time, he was his own man. He felt that although it was surely true that he was to be judged in this venerable rite, he was in certain respects beyond judgement. He was confident, but not expectant. For whatever the decision, his heart would not change and he would be the same, having learned the same lessons and understood what it is to be a king, even were he not to remain one. If Craig-Vyvyan the falcon would fly, that would be a magnificent thing, but if he did not, it would be magnificent still. Understanding this as he had come to understand it allowed him finally to look upon the falcon with detached affection. The falcon seemed to take notice of this, and to stir with respect, as if he were in the presence of someone he had been born and bred to recognise.
In gusts of wind that flapped his jacket and blew up a furore of glittering snow that then fell like fairy dust, Freddy held out his arm, and Bannerman transferred the falcon. “Let him get accustomed to you, sir,” Bannerman said.
Freddy nodded, turned south, and took a few steps into the glare of the sun. Now he was, as it were, alone, and all of England was spread out in blue at his feet. These minutes were to be his own, for he, his parents, and their parents before them, had spent their lives in contemplation of such moments (and on yachts and at race tracks), and perhaps it was this that enabled him to see things in the blue that others could not. It is true however that he did see them, in a vision as real as anything that ever was.
There on the summit appeared before him, not in catalogue but in moving images of all colours, the bravery, the genius, and the heart of England that it was his calling and destiny to serve. He saw before him the outline of a lion rampant, and knew that this was the after-image, projected by reflected sunlight, of the shape of Britain echoing back and impressed upon the sky. And like a lion rampant it was not still, but, to keep balance, made of its paws a whirlwind, as if there were a hurricane buffeting the Irish Sea. The paws being of light, the whirlwind was of light, like a golden engine, like
thread whirling on a bobbin, or a wheel driven by steam until its spokes made a maelstrom. From within this generation, things arose that it was Freddy’s fate to see for a fleeting instant but to know forever.
He saw the little ships, crescent-shaped, recoiling bow and stern from the sea like a silkworm contracting. He saw them from afar, by the thousands, in a long sunlit line making their ways over the oceans of the world. He saw a patchwork of fields so vast that it looked like the sun reflecting at high speed off an agitated lake. In an agricultural summary that no statistical branch could hope to match, each of these fields, changing its dimensions, went rapidly through every cycle of growth it had seen in two millennia, blinking first as the trees were felled, and then flashing like sparks from an acetylene torch as each harvest was taken. Within each flash of years were the flashes of days, and within each flash of days were the flashes of changing light over minutes and seconds, every turn of every blade or golden stalk, each windswept pattern casting back at heaven the richly complicated shower of light that heaven had sent to it infinitesimally divided and yet flowing as smoothly as a swelling stream.
This was a sight for kings, a gale of sensation sweeping by in black light as if in an unimaginable transit of the universe, and the king in its midst stood fast and stared ahead. Every microscopic field fled past at unfathomable speed, with each flash awakening him from the exhaustion the previous one had occasioned. When these images joined the chain of ships circling in the whirlwind on the sea, Freddy was knocked back a bit by a wave of battles compressed as if all battles had combined into one. He had to put his heels down hard, and yet, on this front that was like a tidal wave, every pewter helmet, every arrow, every banging shield, every shot from every cannon and gun, every bomb falling, every black night made red by artillery, every line of khaki or cavalry, every sword floating timelessly in the air before its strike, was visible individually. Now Jutland, blinding; now Lexington, and Ladysmith, and Passchendaele, Anzio, Trafalgar, and Arnhem. There was no way properly to credit or acknowledge the scores of millions who had fought in the name of the king, and the millions who, in the name of the king, had died. Only God could so acknowledge, and, as for the king, this was the unbearable burden that would press him down for the rest of his days.