“Now you see,” Alamayou said. “I live because of the one who loved me.”
§
He poured some tea for the queen. While he’d spoken, her eyes had flitted to his hand in search of the scars.
After he set her cup down, he held out his right hand for her to see. She turned it over and looked at the fire damage there.
“Love.” Her voice trailed off. “It’s folly to think we can bring old loves back, isn’t it?”
“It’s folly to think old loves grow old just because we do, Your Majesty. I close my eyes and he’s forever young. And so he’ll be when I close my eyes for the last time. Whether now or later.”
They smiled at each other, at how the years had changed them and yet left their perennial foolish hearts untouched.
I’m the idiot, Alamayou thought, carrying paintings in my eyes and expecting the world to bend itself into those colors.
He looked into her cloudy eyes and saw that she understood him, utterly; she carried paintings of her own. Her bright hot star, and his.
All that time, he’d considered his life a mystery waiting for someone to untie it and let it unravel completely, but here was an old woman, more powerful than anyone and anything but time, and she was every bit the mystery he was.
“We wish to be in our room now,” she said. “Exhaustion overtakes us. It’s a terrible thing to be this old.”
“Let me summon your lady,” Princess Louise suggested.
“He will take us.”
She held out her teacup for the princess to take, then waited expectantly for Alamayou. He linked his arm in hers and led her out of the portrait room, exchanging looks with Rabbi Ariel as he passed.
Through the windows of the corridor he saw Windsor’s gates open to let in a procession of dignitaries arriving by landaus numbering in the dozens. “My deathwatch,” the queen said, shaking her head. “Tomorrow we depart for Osborne House. It’s where I want to die. The grounds there, my room, the Durbar Wing. That’s what I want to see at my end. I’ve had a lifetime of mourning in the Blue Room. It’s enough. A speech tomorrow and then I depart.”
At the Blue Room door she slipped her arm out of his. “To this moment,” she said, “I’ve been mulling what it is I should say to everyone tomorrow. How does one say goodbye to the world one created?”
“How to say a life.”
“Yes. That’s the dilemma, exactly.”
They smiled wearily at each other. “There’s been a pain in my heart all these years for you,” she said. “I don’t feel it now.”
“Then I’m so glad I came, whatever else may take place from here.”
“Wait here a moment.”
“Your Majesty, I’ve nowhere else to go.”
“On that point, you’re quite wrong. You’ve everywhere to go.”
She stepped inside the Blue Room under her own power. It was excruciating to watch her walk, far more so than watching Prince Leopold at his lowest ebb. She was so fragile. Her legs quivered to the point that he feared she’d fall with each step.
Somehow she made it to her nightstand, where she picked up an envelope and brought it back to him.
He opened it. His eyes filled with tears.
“I must rest,” she told him. “Be here tomorrow, for my speech. I wish to see you, if I have the strength to look up. One never knows the great heights one might ascend.”
“I will. Your Majesty, the date on this—”
“It’s been waiting quite a long time. I assure you, it will do the job. I’ve checked. I’m old, but not enfeebled. We still rule, after all.”
“May you always,” he said, the words catching in his throat.
“Embrace the oath you spoke in our courtyard. ‘I live.’ We welcome you back, Alamayou.”
She closed the door.
§
Rabbi Ariel and the princess stood when he returned to the portrait room. He handed the envelope to the rabbi.
After everything, he thought, it’s only right that the old man be the first to read it. He is, after all, my friend.
The rabbi unfolded it and began to read. The smile slowly spread across his face. “Oh, mayn zun.”
Rabbi Ariel gave it to Princess Louise. She nodded vigorously as her eyes filled. “January ninth, eighteen sixty-nine. My God, she wrote this the day you left.”
Their arms encircled him as he spoke the queen’s pronouncement aloud.
“I’m pardoned.”
Chapter Twenty-One
4 January 1901
The following morning, Alamayou woke to the sound of drums.
He bolted from his bed and ran to the window, his mind feverish with the thought that he would see his father’s soldiers setting their fires across the plains and pounding their negerit, the war drums.
Frith Street was filled with carts and carriages. The wheels thundered across the cobblestones as Little Britain came alive. It was still early and the light was only just pushing in from between the buildings, into the open.
On the table next to his bed, he found his letters. Philip’s and the queen’s pardon. The rabbi had tied them together with a bit of silken string from his tzitzit.
Two lives, bound one to the other by a piece of blessed twine.
The aroma of cooking breakfast reached him. In the kitchen, Rabbi Ariel spooned some eggs onto plates set out next to a rasher of toast. Alamayou sat down while the rabbi poured them tea. Over the years, the rabbi had begun at last to favor the stronger British blends. After a cup or two, Alamayou found him as chatty as a grand dame.
The rabbi was pensive as he sat down next to Alamayou. “I think a part of me always knew there was something more to you. Your story was in your eyes, since the day you came up to me in the Marais.”
His age-spotted hand shook as he reached for a piece of toast. “I miss Philip. He was my friend. But I can say, yes. I know him. Or I knew him. I’ll always call him friend. As I do you, now.”
“I miss him, too,” Alamayou said.
At that moment, it seemed to Alamayou that they were about to say all things they’d never said in thirty-odd years of living in each other’s company. The silent dinners, the days spent working alongside each other at the synagogue, the innumerable hours of their lives that passed by unremarked upon, now came to them in the room on Frith. Maybe, after all that time, those things needed mentioning. Each of those hours lay under a lie, after all, the way a baby rests under a blanket and dreams of no particular thing, moving in sleep to a melody the watchful parents will never learn about.
We’ll stare at each other, Alamayou thought. Or he’ll strike me, the way he ought to do. I’m another son gone to see the world, never to return.
“I’m sorry,” he said as Rabbi Ariel’s arms folded around him. “I’m so sorry.”
“This is no confession,” the rabbi said. “This is a testament of life. Of love.” He smiled and wiped his eyes. “You’re almost done, my friend. My new old friend. Come, we should be making our way to Windsor. A prince shouldn’t keep a queen waiting. But here, this belongs to you.”
The rabbi placed the carte de visite on top of the letters, above Philip’s last words. Love is language.
§
The queen’s route away from Windsor was well planned. By the time Alamayou and the rabbi arrived at the castle, anxious crowds had come from everywhere to say their goodbyes. Her procession, once it left, would travel by closed landau from Windsor to Paddington and across the parks to Buckingham. There were stopping points along the route where dignitaries, kings, princes, and governing heads of state from all her colonies waited to pay their respects. She’d pass Westminster Abbey with an Indian brigade of cavalry for escort. Scaffolds of her subjects some ten miles in length snaked back through the city from the castle gates.
Alamayou and the rabbi were admitted
and found their seats in a box behind Princess Louise. Across from them, old men in the Parliamentary section glared and whispered to each other.
Alamayou wondered if, underneath their wrinkles and gray shocks of hair, he would find the same men who’d joined Naismith in calling for his banishment.
They were both bundled against the chill. Rabbi Ariel wore an ascot, the only bit of color Alamayou had ever seen on him. “One keepsake of London that you can’t call a tchotchke,” the rabbi said.
It made the old man look almost jaunty. He seemed entirely pleased with it, Alamayou thought, judging from the way he spied himself in the glass of carriages and shops on the way, smiling at what he saw.
He caught the rabbi smiling at him, too, on more than one occasion. Once, it was a sad smile. Once, puzzled. Soon, he hoped, he would look up and see forgiveness.
The queen’s balcony doors opened. The curtains of the room lifted with the frigid air. The crowds outside fell silent as word spread.
In a moment she emerged, took hold of the balcony rail to steady herself, and spread a sheet of paper atop a small lectern. She glanced across the grounds and at the throngs sitting in the boxes.
She saw Alamayou and nodded.
Clearing her throat, she began.
“Who can say what love is, in the end.
“We expect so much. We expect to know how and when love will find us, and who we’ll be when the day comes. We expect the seasons to unfold and all the years to follow as promised, and all the births and deaths will come in an orderly and proper fashion, and life will stay in the room we’ve built for it with our plans. We don’t expect our hearts to go wandering off and get lost, or broken, or mended again.
“We’re reasonable creatures, but we don’t understand how all that we are burns away with time. The homes of our childhood fall or are rebuilt for someone else. Our century’s mechanisms for holding memories, the paintings and photo plates, the grainy voices unspooling across the black wax rings of Edison’s dreams, one day fade. The ones who knew us and loved us in spite of it all are lost to the years. With each extinguishing light, so we extinguish, little by little.
“A life lived reduces us to the last keepsake, the last memory. Is that where we’ve been keeping our loves, even ourselves, all along?
“I can say that I am your queen. A mother. Once, a wife. My physicians reduce me to the smallest visible parts, the blood, the cell. Science takes us further with each passing year, and soon we’ll be little more than rumors and specks of physics. We’ll see what can’t be seen by the simple eye, and we’ll consider that God particle and ask: Is it me? Have I left enough for you to know me? For my children, grandchildren, and those I’ve been fortunate enough to call friend, to remember me by?
“I truly didn’t know how to answer this until recently. But now I can, and so I leave you with this, the thing I’ve learned so late in my life. What I leave of myself, what all of you will carry of me, is what you carry of your own family and friends. It is how we call all of our most precious memories, hopes, and dreams up from the secret places we keep them when we wish—when we need—to hold them one more time, or one last time. What we leave of ourselves is love, spoken by any means necessary. In the end, love is language.”
Alamayou closed his eyes and let the cold wind try to find a way in. It would try and it would fail, because nothing could hurt him now. She’d seen him. His secret heart had been called out by name, to the thousands.
Did you hear her, Philip? She just told us we’re home now.
She smiled, and Alamayou thought the sight of her smile, filling as it did with memories the way the balloon on Hyde Park once filled with fired air, was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“To all of you,” she said, “we are blessed for knowing you. We carry you with us wherever we may go from here. God bless you all, and save you all.”
Hands emerged from behind the curtains. They reached for her to help her back inside.
Around them, the crowd began to cheer. It spread through the boxes into the courtyard and beyond the gate, sweeping down the processional route like a wave. The day was clear and bright, and the gathered didn’t leave. The sun glistened from the windows. It didn’t feel like mourning. It didn’t seem possible to any of them that their queen would be gone soon. Something new had been born on her balcony, not seen since, of all things, the plague years, when children came with flowers for their monarch despite the terror of disease. They’d dared when their families didn’t, because the woman they scarcely understood, who lived behind the gate, lost someone and they wanted her to know she wasn’t alone.
Now the queen had given that gift back to her people.
Alamayou listened to Louise and her siblings and their children talk about the upcoming trip to Osborne House, about nannies and nurses and matters of the state that would have to wait for their return. He knew they meant the return from the queen’s funeral and all that would involve. He knew that he would be there, with the rabbi. He would weep with them because, like them, he would lose someone he loved.
But this day, she’d given him back what he’d given her. Peace.
Princess Louise gestured for him to come to her. They walked toward the castle.
“She wants you to go to Osborne House with the rest of her family,” the princess said.
“I’d be honored. May the rabbi come, too?”
“He may. He’s a good man.”
“Don’t tell him that. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“I’m not deaf, you know,” Rabbi Ariel said as he followed them inside. “Maybe she’d permit an old rebbe to say a prayer for her.”
They gathered in the portrait room while the guests outside made their way home. Their clothes and possessions were brought over from Frith Street and packed. Over the course of the afternoon, they ate and talked while, across the city, the audience swelled in anticipation of the queen’s final ride.
Dusk gathered at the windows. Alamayou built a fire.
The portrait room door opened and she came inside.
“We wish to take the paintings with us,” Princess Louise said. “It’s time. Alamayou, a carriage waits for you and your friend. We are so glad for your company. Come.”
§
They climbed into their carriages, and as the sun set they left the Round Tower and the Walk behind. Alamayou leaned out to feel the cold air on his face. He saw the queen through the window of her own landau, staring back at Windsor as it fell into the distance. Seeing him, she held up a hand. He held up his own, and for a moment he thought he saw Philip’s, raised alongside his. Not alone.
He thought of those two hands alongside each other, resting on the Feroze rail. Their first language had been silence and distance. The language of their fathers, which didn’t prepare them for what they found in the world once their fathers were dead.
Then their hands spoke their first shared language. They couldn’t say enough, or say it right, because they knew nothing about each other and had no way to give each other that first piece that would open the door.
Until they found the words.
I can answer my father now, Philip, for both of us: God did not make us like him.
In our time, in that bright hot star, we found all the words for what we were. Love was language. The language we spoke in daylight and the language we spoke at night. Our language brought us from a cottage on fire, across the sea, and further than we could ever have imagined.
“Are you all right?” Rabbi Ariel asked.
“Yes.”
“When it’s over, will you stay in England or come back with me?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“It’s good to know that you could make a life for yourself in either place, eh? Something to think about.”
“It is.”
Alamayou sat
back as the world moved around him. The rabbi was happy as a child as they passed waving onlookers. Occasionally he waved back, to their utter confusion.
Alamayou thought about the rabbi’s question throughout their journey to the Isle of Wight and Osborne House. He walked the beach below the gardens and watched the sea carry in from distant places, and in the evening of their arrival, he sat alone in the Durbar Room and stared at the portraits hanging alongside the chimneypiece and peacock over the mantel. When it grew dark, he built a fire while the rabbi studied his Talmud nearby.
The old man’s incantations filled the air, but all Alamayou heard was the rebbe’s question turning over and over in his mind. What comes after this?
The only answer there could be for someone like him was, I don’t know. There had been a time when the same question haunted him. Wandering the streets of Paris while a ship took Philip to a death meant for him, the next day and the next could have been anything, and that felt like being damned.
But now, he thought before the Durbar hearth, this blank canvas feels like possibility. No, rebbe, I don’t know what all the rest of my life will be. But there are a few things I can at least hope for.
I hope for you. Your friendship, now and every day after. I hope for peace to settle around the queen and her family. I hope you get to say that prayer while she can still hear you. She’ll find comfort in your voice, and in your words. I know I always have.
Grant her light.
A servant came to the room, followed by the queen in a wheeled chair pushed by her daughter. As Louise brought her mother to the fire, a line of grandchildren filed in to kiss her while she sat, still and frail, staring at the paintings.
To their eyes she was ancient, small and sick and even frightening. The young fear anything old, he thought. It’s too close to death and too far from them.
But he could see the queen’s bright, clear eyes, full of knowledge and memory. As her descendants said their goodbyes—the littlest ones were too young to understand, yet they cried anyway at the sight of so many grownups in tears—the queen smiled at them. She waved weakly.
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