Ten Letters

The library at Columbia Palace was on the first floor at the back, over the garden, and nobody used it. It had been built for a King who was going to live in the house and read in it, and he had not come, and neither had the next one, and the room had waited for more than two hundred years with its ladders and its green lamps and its long table in the middle like a place set for a dinner that had been put off. The books were mostly bound reports of things. There was a shelf of the Gazette that went back to 1870, and a shelf of atlases in which the borders were wrong in interesting ways, and a whole wall of the debates of Parliament, in calf, with gold on the spines, that his mother had been working her way along since September, one evening at a time, and had not told him about, and he had not said that he knew.

It was raining. It had been raining since the river, and the garden was grey and full of wet leaves, and the gardener’s barrow stood in the middle of the lawn with nobody near it, filling up.

Rosalind Aird came in at ten with a shoebox.

She had changed her shoes in the lift. He could tell, because she was walking carefully, the way she did in the first five minutes in proper ones, as if the floor had been polished against her personally. The shoebox was from a shop in Cleveland and had once held boots, and she had written on the end of it in marker pen SATURDAY, and under that, smaller, 4.

“Four,” said Frederick.

“The fourth Saturday.” She put the box down on the long table in front of him and sat, not beside him and not opposite, but at the corner, where she could see him and he did not have to see her. “I thought I’d number them. In case you want to know, later, which week was which.”

“Will I want to know?”

“I have no idea,” said Rosalind Aird. “That’s why I numbered them.”

She did not take the lid off. That was the arrangement, and had been since the first Saturday, when he had asked, at breakfast, whether he might read some of the letters, and Dame M had looked at his mother and his mother had looked at the ceiling and then said, in Swedish, ten, as though she had been asked how many biscuits. Ten, chosen at random, every Saturday, and nobody to read them before him, and nobody to tell him which were kind. Rosalind Aird had worked out the method herself and explained it to him in the car with the seriousness of a person describing a chemical process. The letters came into the post room in grey sacks. On Saturday morning she went down, and the post room opened whichever sack was newest, and she shut her eyes and put her hand in ten times while Sergeant Cole from the gate watched to see that she did not cheat. Sergeant Cole had been asked to do this by nobody and had appointed himself. He signed a form afterwards. There was no form; he had drawn one.

“Before you start,” she said.

He waited.

“Nine of them are random.” She looked at the box and not at him. “One isn’t. The post room put one aside on Thursday because it was in the same handwriting as one they’d seen before, and they brought it to me, and I looked at the envelope, and I took it out of the sack before I shut my eyes.” She made herself look up. “So it’s nine and one. I’m telling you because I said I’d never lie to you, and putting it in the box and letting you think it came out by chance would have been a lie. A small one. I’d have known.”

“Which handwriting?”

“You’ll know it,” said Rosalind Aird. “It’s on top.”

---

It was on top.

It was a blue envelope, the kind that came in a packet with the paper to match, and it was addressed in pencil, pressed hard, in big careful capitals that went downhill towards the right-hand corner: TO PRINCE FREDERICK, COLUMBIA PALACE, NEW WESTMINSTER, THE USA, with the USA crossed out and THE REALM written over it by somebody else, in ink, in grown-up writing. On the back, in the same pencil, FROM CIARAN POWER BAY BULLS NFLD, and under it, AGE 9, in case anybody was wondering.

He had wondered. On the first Saturday, when he had taken the first letter out of the first box and opened it, he had not known anything at all about who would be inside, and it had been Ciaran Power, age nine, whose father was a deckhand on the Kathleen Marie. Ciaran had written to tell him that his father had been on the boat that found the King, which Frederick knew, and that his father had seen the raft first, before the skipper, which Frederick had not known, and which might not be true, and which Frederick had decided was true. He had written that his father didn’t talk about it, except once, at tea, when he said the King had been very cold and had not woken up the whole way in, and that they had put every coat on the boat over him, even the skipper’s good one. He had written that he was sorry about the valet. He had drawn the Kathleen Marie at the bottom of the page, with a lot of crab pots on the back and a large smiling sun.

Frederick had written back the same afternoon, by hand, on palace paper, which Rosalind Aird had said was the right paper, because it would be kept. He did not remember all of what he had said. He remembered that he had thanked Ciaran’s father, and the whole crew, and that he had said the King had been very cold and was now warm, and that he had said he was sorry about the valet too, whose name was Graham, and who had taught him to tie a tie.

He opened the blue envelope.

Dear Prince Frederick,

Thank you for your letter. My Mom has put it in a frame in the front room and nobody is allowed to touch it, not even my Nan. Everybody came to see it. Mr Walsh from the store came. My Dad read it at tea and went outside for a while and then came in again.

Dad is mending pots now because the season is done. He says thank you for saying thank you. He says nobody on the boat knew it was the King until the helicopter came and the man in the helicopter said, and then the skipper sat down on a bucket.

At school everybody asks me about the King. I dont know anything so I say he is fine. Is that a lie?

On TV it said your Dad wants to stop being King. Is he going to? Mom says I am not allowed to ask you that. I am asking you anyway because you can not answer if you want.

I hope your Dad is warm.

From Ciaran Power

PS The boat is up on the slip for the winter getting painted. It is going to be the same colour.

He read it twice. The second time he read the bit about the bucket again, and then the bit about the lie, and then the postscript, and then he put the letter down flat on the table and kept his hand on it.

“All right?” said Rosalind Aird.

“The skipper sat down on a bucket.”

“I saw that through the envelope,” she said. “I’m joking. I didn’t read it.”

“I know you didn’t.” He looked at the letter. “Can I answer it now?”

“You can answer it whenever you like. The paper’s in the drawer.” She nodded at the end of the table, where there was a drawer he had not known was there. “But read the others first. That’s my only advice, and you can ignore it. If you answer the one you wanted first, you’ll read the other nine as the ones you didn’t.”

He thought about that, and decided that she was right, and folded Ciaran’s letter back into its envelope and put it to one side, on its own, and took out the next one.

---

The next one was from Tucson.

It was in a long white envelope with a typed address and a small clear handwriting inside, on lined paper torn from a pad, three sides. It was from a Mrs Inés Ochoa, who said she was seventy-one and a retired teacher of the fourth grade and that she had never written to anybody famous before and did not intend to start making a habit of it.

My husband Ruben had a stroke four years ago this January, she wrote. He was sixty-eight. He lost almost all his words, and for the first month the only thing he could say was “no,” which he said to everything, including things he meant yes to, and which was very hard on both of us and also, I am sorry to say, quite funny.

I am writing because the papers say your father has trouble with his words now, and I wanted to tell somebody in your family a few things I learned that the doctors did not tell me, and I thought you might be the one who would listen, since your mother has a great deal to do.

The words come back in a strange order. Ruben got the names of birds first. He had watched birds all his life and he could not say my name but he could say “cactus wren” and “Gambel’s quail,” clear as anything, in the second month, and I cried in the kitchen. Then nouns. Then me. Then, much later, the little words, the ones that join things up, and some of those never came back at all, and we manage without them.

Do not let anybody make him practise in front of you if he does not want to. It is a kind of nakedness.

Read to him things he already knows. Not new things. Things he knows the shape of, so that he can follow along without having to find anything. For Ruben it was the baseball scores and the Twenty-Third Psalm. I do not know what it would be for a King.

And do not let anybody tell you to be brave. You do not have to be brave. You only have to be there. They are not the same thing, and the second one is harder, and nobody gives you a medal for it.

Ruben says hello. He can say that now.

Yours sincerely, Inés Ochoa (Mrs)

PS Ruben wants me to say that his team will do better next year. I do not know why he wants you to know this.

Frederick read it and sat for a moment and then read the part about the order of the words again, and the part about the things he already knows.

“The trains,” he said.

Rosalind Aird did not ask what he meant. She did not know about the trains, or he did not think she did, and she did not ask, which was one of the things about her.

He looked round. Castellanos was in the doorway, where he always stood, half in the room and half in the corridor, so that he could see both and belong to neither, with his hands behind him, looking at a point on the ceiling just above the bookcase with the atlases.

“Mr Castellanos.”

“Sir.”

“Do you know a Mrs Ochoa? In Tucson? She taught fourth grade.”

Castellanos lowered his eyes from the ceiling, very slowly, as if they were heavy.

“Which school, sir?”

Frederick looked. “It doesn’t say. It’s on East Lester Street. The address.”

There was a pause.

“There is a Mrs Ochoa who taught fourth grade at Sam Hughes, sir,” said Castellanos. “In about 1997. She was very strict about long division and she kept a lizard in a tank on the windowsill called Mr Bigotes, which bit me.”

Frederick stared at him.

“It’s a big city, sir,” said Castellanos. “There will be several Mrs Ochoas.” He looked at the ceiling again. “Probably it isn’t her.”

“Do you want to see it?”

“No, sir,” said Castellanos. “Thank you. It’s your letter.” And then, after a moment, still to the ceiling: “If it is her, you could tell her the lizard is forgiven.”

---

He read the others in the order they came out of the box.

A girl of seven in Cebu had drawn a hospital with a rainbow on top of it and a very large man in a bed who was smiling, and had written underneath, in her mother’s hand, with her own name in her own hand at the bottom in letters of different sizes, for the King to get better from Ligaya. He propped it up against the shoebox where he could see it.

A Friends’ meeting in a town in Pennsylvania wrote, on behalf of all of its members, that they were holding his father and his mother and him in the Light, and that they did not expect an answer and would rather not have one, since an answer would be a kind of fuss, and their meeting did not hold with fuss. The letter was signed by the clerk. It was the shortest one in the box, and Frederick liked it very much, and did what it asked.

A man in Baltimore who had driven trains for the Pennsylvania Railroad for thirty-eight years sent him, folded very small, a public timetable for the New Westminster to New York line from the winter of 1962, with a note that said his wife had been in hospital for a long time once and he had read her the timetable in the evenings, because she knew it and could follow along, and he thought a young man might like to have an old one, for no reason, and he was sorry if this was a strange thing to send.

Frederick held the timetable for a long time.

“Nobody knows about the trains,” he said.

“I don’t know about the trains,” said Rosalind Aird.

“Nobody knows. I checked. I asked Mamma not to say and she didn’t, and the nurses don’t, because it’s only an hour, and they’re not there.” He unfolded the timetable on the table. It was soft as cloth along the creases. The 7:15 to Penn Station, calling at Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia. “How did he know?”

Rosalind Aird looked at the timetable and then at him.

“He didn’t know about you,” she said gently. “He knows about hospitals.”

He folded the timetable back up along its old creases, very carefully, so as not to tear it, and put it in his shirt pocket, and kept it there.

---

A woman who had been a nurse at New Westminster General for thirty years, until she retired, wrote to tell him three things. The first was that the chapel on the second floor was the quietest room in the building and nobody ever went in it except at Christmas, and he could sit in it as long as he liked and nobody would ask him anything. The second was that the night sister on six, if it was still Mrs Delacroix, was the best nurse she had ever worked with and frightened of nothing, including doctors. The third was that the vending machine at the end of the sixth-floor corridor took Swedish coins if you put them in fast, because nobody had ever fixed it, and the porters had known since 1994.

“That’s true,” said Frederick.

“Which?”

“All three.” He thought. “I haven’t tried the coins.”

“Don’t tell me if you do,” said Rosalind Aird.

A man in Ohio, a long way from her part of it, she said, without looking, when he read out the postmark, wrote in green ink on both sides of four sheets that the family had had two hundred and fifty years and that was enough, and that a country that could not choose its own head of state was a child that would not leave home, and that it was no reflection on Frederick personally, who seemed a decent enough kid, but that the decent thing for his father to do now was to stop, and for Frederick to stop too, and to go and be a dentist or something useful. He had signed it with his full name and his address and his telephone number, in case Frederick wanted to discuss it.

Frederick read all four sheets. Some of it he did not follow. Some of it he thought was quite well argued, and he could hear, behind it, a man at a kitchen table late at night with a pen that was running out, and he did not mind the man as much as he expected to.

He read the last paragraph aloud.

“A dentist,” he said.

“You’d be a terrible dentist,” said Rosalind Aird. “You can’t look at blood. I’ve seen you at the hospital when they change the line.”

“I could learn.”

“You could.” She was watching him, carefully, the way she had watched him on Wednesday at the kitchen table when he wrote the statement. “Do you want me to take that kind out? In future? I can. Nobody would know. It’s my hand in the sack.”

He thought about it. He thought about it honestly, because she had asked honestly, and because there was a part of him, quite a large part, that would have liked never to read the word enough in green ink again.

“No,” he said. “Then it wouldn’t be ten at random. It’d be ten that you’d picked.” He put the four sheets back in their envelope. “And he signed it. He put his telephone number. He’d have minded, if he’d known I’d only read the nice ones.”

Rosalind Aird wrote something in her notebook, and he did not ask what.

---

A man in Milwaukee wanted a job, any job, at the palace or anywhere the palace could put in a word, and had enclosed his references, which were good, and a photograph of himself with his three daughters on a pier. There was a note from the Household paper-clipped to it already, from the post room, which said only Passed to Employment, and the date, and Frederick did not know whether that meant anything would happen.

“Will it?”

“I’ll find out,” said Rosalind Aird. “And I’ll tell you either way.”

A sister in a convent in Normandy, in French, had sent a small card with a picture of Saint Christopher on it carrying a child across a river, and on the back, in a beautiful old-fashioned hand, Pour le père, pour le fils, et pour la mère qui les porte tous les deux. He turned it over and over. For the father, for the son, and for the mother who carries them both. He had been going to put it with the drawing, and then he did not. He put it in his shirt pocket with the timetable.

And the tenth was from a girl in County Kildare who was also fifteen, and who said in the first paragraph that she was very sorry about his father and was praying for him and so was her whole class, and in the second paragraph that she had a horse called Biscuit, and in the third paragraph, and the fourth, and on the back of the sheet, and up the margin of the front, sideways, a very great deal more about Biscuit, who had won a rosette in August and was afraid of bags, and who had once, in a field outside Naas, eaten an entire hat.

Frederick laughed out loud in the library. It went up to the ceiling and came back down off the calf-bound debates.

“Biscuit,” he said.

“Biscuit,” said Rosalind Aird, who had not read it, and was laughing too.

---

He wrote to Ciaran last.

He took the palace paper out of the drawer at the end of the table and a pen from his own pocket, not the palace pen in the stand, and sat for a while with the blue letter open beside him, and the drawing of the hospital propped against the shoebox, and the rain on the windows, and then he wrote it straight through, without stopping, in his own handwriting, which sloped the wrong way and which his mother said looked like a fence in a wind.

Dear Ciaran,

Thank you for your letter, and please thank your Mom for the frame, and your Nan for not touching it.

Please tell your Dad thank you for saying thank you for saying thank you. I think that’s three. Tell him it can stop there if he wants, or it can go on, and I don’t mind which.

You asked if it’s a lie to say the King is fine. I don’t think it is a lie. He is warm, and he is awake, and he knows us, and he listens. He can’t say very much. But he is himself, and that is fine, even when it isn’t. Both of those are true at once. My mother says that, and it’s the most useful thing anybody’s ever told me.

You asked if my Dad is going to stop being King. I don’t know. That’s true. He asked a question, and people in a lot of places are answering it, and when they’ve all answered he’ll decide. If anyone at school asks you, you can tell them the Prince doesn’t know either, and that won’t be a lie.

I’m glad the boat is going to be the same colour.

Your friend, Frederick

He read it once. Then he turned to Rosalind Aird, who had been looking out of the window at the barrow on the lawn the whole time he was writing, so that she would not see a word of it.

“Can I say your friend?”

She thought about it properly, the way she thought about everything.

“Is it true?”

“I think so. He wrote twice. I wrote twice.” He looked at it. “I don’t have very many. It’s not a big list.”

“Then you can say it,” said Rosalind Aird. “If it’s true, you can say anything. That’s the whole of my job.” She held out her hand for the envelope. “I’ll put it in the bag myself. It’ll go to Bay Bulls by Thursday. The post room will want to frame the envelope. I won’t let them.”

He addressed it, in the same sloping hand, Ciaran Power, Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, and then stopped, because he did not have the rest of the address, and she took it from him and said the post room had it, from last time, and that it was only a small place, and they would find him.

The other nine would get a card. Everybody got a card. Rosalind Aird had shown him one on the first Saturday, cream, with the crown on it and three lines thanking the writer for their kindness to the King and to the family, and his name printed underneath, not signed, because forty thousand was too many for anybody’s hand. He had asked whether he might sign the ten. She had said yes. He signed them now, nine cards, one after another, Frederick, and on Mrs Ochoa’s he wrote underneath, small, before he could think better of it, P.S. The lizard is forgiven, and gave it to Rosalind Aird, and she looked at it, and did not ask, and put it in the envelope.

At the door, Castellanos looked down from the ceiling, and said nothing, and looked back up.

---

At four he went to the hospital.

The rain had stopped. The window on the sixth floor had a clean, rinsed look, and the railway below it was shining, and his father was sitting up in the chair, not the bed, with a blanket over his knees, in the grey cardigan that his mother had brought from London, which still smelled faintly of the study.

Frederick sat on the end of the bed and did his chemistry for forty minutes, and his father watched the window. Twice the nurse came in, and the second time it was the night sister, early, a small woman of about sixty with very short white hair, and her name badge said DELACROIX, and she checked the chart and nodded at Frederick as if he were a colleague and went out again. He did not say anything about the vending machine.

At a quarter to five he put the chemistry away.

“Papa.” His father turned his head, carefully, the way he did everything now. “I had a letter. From a boy in Bay Bulls. His father’s on the Kathleen Marie.”

His father looked at him.

“The boat,” said Frederick. “The one that found you. His father’s a deckhand. He says nobody on the boat knew it was you until the helicopter came, and then the skipper sat down on a bucket.” He watched his father’s face. “He wrote before. I wrote back. He wrote again, today. I wrote back again.”

Nothing moved in his father’s face for a while. Frederick did not know how much of it had gone in, or where to. His father did not remember the boat. The physicians had said so, and the bulletin had said so: nothing of the aircraft striking the water, nothing of the raft, nothing of the cold, nothing of the crew of five who had pulled him out of it and the man who had sat down on a bucket. Everything Frederick knew about his father’s rescue his father had been told.

Then his father’s hand moved on the blanket. It came up a little and went down again, the right one, the one that worked.

“Thank him,” said his father.

Frederick looked at him.

“I did,” he said. “I did, Papa. Twice.”

His father shut his eyes. It was not tiredness. Frederick had learned the difference in a week. It was what his father did now instead of nodding, because nodding was hard, and it meant good, or yes, or that will do, and Frederick had decided, the way he had decided about Ciaran’s father seeing the raft first, that it meant all three.

He took the timetable out of his bag, the hospital’s own, Sunday’s, which was the thinnest of the week, and then he stopped, and put his hand to his shirt pocket instead, and took out the other one, the soft one from 1962, folded small, and unfolded it on his knee.

“This is an old one,” he said. “A man sent it. It doesn’t matter. It’s just the same line.” He found the place. “Seven fifteen from New Westminster. Calling at Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, Newark. Arriving New York, Pennsylvania Station, at ten forty.”

His father’s eyes stayed shut, and his hand lay on the blanket, and outside the window, at exactly a quarter to five, the long train from the north came in under the hospital over the shining rails, sixty-six years later than the one in the timetable and bound for the same place, and Frederick read on.