Prologue

The side entrance of New Westminster General had a ramp for deliveries and a door that stuck. Sergeant Castellanos went through it first, as he always did, and held it with his shoulder, as he always did, and said, “Afternoon, sir,” to the porter at the desk, who said, “Afternoon, Sergeant,” and did not look at Frederick at all, which was the porter’s way of being kind.

It was five to four. Frederick had come straight from school with his bag, and the bag had his history in it and his geometry and the timetable, which he did not need and carried anyway.

“Lift or stairs?” said Castellanos.

“Stairs.”

“Stairs it is.”

There were six flights. Frederick took them two at a time and Castellanos took them one at a time and was at the top first, which Frederick had never understood and had stopped trying to.

The corridor on the sixth floor was the colour of weak tea. There was a window at the end of it that looked over the car park and the railway, and a chair by the window where Castellanos sat for the hour and looked at the ceiling. A nurse came out of his father’s room with a tray and saw him and smiled with her mouth shut.

“He’s awake,” she said. “He’s had a long day.”

“I know,” said Frederick. He had known since breakfast. His mother had told him at the kitchen table, with the bulletin beside her plate and her hand flat on it, as if it might blow away. His speech and parts of his memory may not recover fully. She had read it to him in English and then said it again in Swedish, and he had understood it better the second time, which was always the way with bad things.

“Go on in,” said the nurse.

---

His father was sitting up. Somebody had put a second pillow behind him, and he was looking at the window, where the sky over the railway had gone the flat grey of the end of October. He turned his head when Frederick came in. It took him a while to turn it. It took him a while to do everything now, and he did it all carefully, the way he used to read a document, one clause at a time.

“Hello, Papa.”

His father looked at him. Then he lifted one hand an inch off the blanket and put it down again, which was hello.

Frederick put his bag on the floor and sat in the chair and took out his history. They had a routine and he kept to it, because his father liked it kept to. Homework first, until a quarter to five. Then the trains. He opened the book at the Reform Act and read the same paragraph three times and took nothing from it, and after a while he stopped pretending and looked up.

His father was watching him.

“Mamma told me,” Frederick said. “About this morning.”

His father closed his eyes and opened them.

“They don’t know,” said Frederick. “That’s what they said. They said may. May not recover. It doesn’t mean won’t.”

His father moved his head on the pillow, not quite a shake.

“Frederick,” he said.

It came out slowly but whole. Some words still came whole and some did not come at all, and the doctor had said that nobody could tell in advance which would be which, and that it would change from day to day. Frederick had looked it up afterwards, and the books said the same thing in longer words.

“Yes.”

His father’s mouth worked for a while. His hand on the blanket made a small closing movement, as if he were trying to pick something up off it.

“Ask,” he said.

“Ask what?”

“Them.” A long breath. “Ask them.”

“Who’s them?”

His father looked at him with great patience and a sort of exasperation, the same look he had always had when Frederick got the Crown wrong in the Sunday game, which was not often. Frederick sat very still and thought about it, the way his father would have wanted him to: who them was, when his father said it. There was only one them that his father had ever meant, in fifty years. He had a word for each of them and he had a desk for them. There were fourteen of them.

“The realms,” Frederick said.

His father’s hand stopped moving.

“Ask them what?”

It took a long time. His father looked at the window and then at the ceiling and then at Frederick, and Frederick waited, because you had to wait now, and if you said the word for him he lost the thread and had to start again, and it made him angry, and he had never been angry about anything before.

“What it needs,” said his father. “To stop.”

Frederick heard the trains go past below the window, a long freight going south, wagon after wagon after wagon. He counted eleven of them before he said anything.

“To stop being King,” he said.

His father closed his eyes, which was yes.

“You want to ask them what it would take. All of them. Each one.”

Yes.

“You haven’t decided.”

His father opened his eyes. The look in them was so exactly his father’s that for a moment Frederick could not breathe. It was the look that meant: that is the right question. Go on.

“No,” said his father. And then, because it was important, he did the thing that cost him most, which was to put more than one word together. He did it slowly, and Frederick watched him gather each one before he said it, as if he were going to the back of a long room for it.

“I cannot speak,” his father said, “for them now.”

Frederick looked at his hands.

He thought of the study in London that he had been in perhaps twenty times in his life, with its boxes in fourteen colours, and his father at the desk reading something for the third time, and saying to a man in a dark suit, very quietly, No. That is New Wessex’s to decide, not ours. Draft it again. He thought of the Sunday calls, every Sunday at four for as long as he could remember, his father’s voice from London, A Bill introduced at Ottawa. Which Crown?

“I know,” he said. “I know you can’t.”

His father’s hand found the edge of the blanket and held it.

“Does Mamma know?” said Frederick.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell anybody else? Tomorrow?”

His father looked at him for a long time. Then he moved his hand, very slightly, palm up, towards Frederick, and left it there.

Frederick understood that too.

“You want me to say it,” he said. “For you. Because you can’t say it the way you used to.”

Yes.

Frederick looked at the hand. Then he reached out and put his own on it, which they did not do, either of them, and had not done since he was small. His father’s hand was dry and very light.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll say it.”

---

At a quarter to five he took out the timetable, the way he always did, and opened it at Wednesday, and read his father tomorrow’s arrivals at Union Station.

“Six-fourteen from Richmond,” he read. “Six-forty from Baltimore, the fast one. Seven-oh-two from Philadelphia, calling at Wilmington. Seven-twenty-five from Harrisburg.”

His father listened with his eyes shut. He always listened with his eyes shut. The first week, when nobody knew whether he could hear anything, Frederick had read them anyway, and the nurses had looked at each other, and Frederick had not cared, and then one morning his father had woken up and the first afternoon Frederick came in he had opened his eyes and looked at the timetable and then at Frederick, and Frederick had understood that he had heard all of it, or some of it, or enough.

“Eight-ten from New York,” he read. “The Senator. Twelve minutes late on Tuesdays, usually, because of the bridge at Havre de Grace.”

His father’s mouth moved at the corner.

He read until five. At five the nurse put her head round the door, and Frederick put the timetable back in the bag and stood up.

“Same time tomorrow,” he said, and then remembered that tomorrow would not be the same at all, and said it anyway. “Same time.”

His father lifted his hand an inch off the blanket.

---

In the car Castellanos said nothing for a while, and then, at the lights on Canal Street, “Hartigans’, sir?”

“Yes, please.”

“Mrs Hartigan rang the office. She said to tell you it’s pork chops and you’re to be there by six or she’s giving yours to Theo.”

“Thank you.”

“She also said,” said Castellanos, looking at the lights, “to tell you that’s not a figure of speech.”

Since September his mother had spent her evenings at the hospital, and on Tuesdays, which had always been theirs, Frederick went to the flat. Nobody had decided it. It had happened the first Tuesday, when his mother rang Mrs Hartigan from the hospital corridor to ask if she could possibly, and Mrs Hartigan had said, “He’s here already, he’s peeling potatoes,” and that had been that.

The flat was on the fourth floor of a block in the north-east of the city, past the depot where Mr Hartigan’s buses slept, and the stairwell smelled of floor polish and somebody’s curry. Castellanos stayed in the car on the street, as the officers always did, with a newspaper he never read. They had stopped coming up in the first month, and the neighbours had stopped noticing the car in the second.

Theo opened the door before he knocked.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I’m four minutes early.”

“You’re late by Mum’s clock. Mum’s clock’s seven minutes fast. It’s so we’re never late. Except you, apparently.” Theo looked at him. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you.”

“Come in. She’s doing the red cabbage. Don’t say anything about the red cabbage.”

“I never say anything about the red cabbage.”

“Good. Keep it that way.”

---

The kitchen was the warmest room Frederick knew. It was smaller than the smallest room at Columbia Palace and it had a table in the middle with five chairs round it that didn’t match, and a radio on the windowsill tuned to a station from Milwaukee that you could only get after dark, and a calendar from a church in Wauwatosa with a picture of a lake on it.

Mrs Hartigan turned round from the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and looked at him the way she looked at patients.

“Sit,” she said. “You’ve had a day.”

“Hello, Mrs Hartigan.”

“Hello. Sit. Theo, plates.”

He sat. Mr Hartigan was already at the end of the table in his shirtsleeves, with the newspaper folded to the crossword and a pencil behind his ear. He drove the early shift, the half past five from the depot, and he was always home by three and always in bed by nine, and in between he did the crossword in pencil and never finished it.

“Frederick,” he said.

“Mr Hartigan.”

“Eight letters. Kept in a chest, but not a prisoner.”

Frederick thought about it. “Is there a letter?”

“Fourth one’s an A.”

“Treasure.”

Mr Hartigan counted on his fingers and wrote it in. “That’s why we have you,” he said, and went back to the crossword.

Kate came in at five past six in her work clothes, said, “Oh. Hi,” to Frederick, took a plate from the cupboard, and sat at the far end of the table with her phone. She was eighteen and worked in an insurance office on Fourteenth Street and had told Theo once, in Frederick’s hearing, that she would talk to his friend when his friend was no longer a story, and not before, and Frederick thought that was fair and had never minded.

“Kate,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“I’m eating.”

“You’re texting.”

“I’m texting and eating, it’s a skill.” But she put the phone face down.

Mrs Hartigan put the pork chops on the table and the red cabbage and a dish of potatoes with butter melting on them, and sat down, and said grace in German, quickly, the way she always did, as though God was a busy man and wouldn’t mind. Frederick said Amen with everybody else. He had learned the grace in the first month without trying, the way he had learned most of the German in this kitchen, by sitting in it.

They ate. Mr Hartigan told a story about a man who had got on his bus that morning with a goat, a small one, on a lead, and had wanted to pay a child’s fare for it.

“Did you let him?” said Theo.

“Rules say an animal travels free if it can be carried.”

“Could it be carried?”

“He carried it,” said Mr Hartigan, “to prove the point. Off at Lincoln Park. Both of them very pleased with themselves.” He ate a potato. “Goat looked like your principal.”

“Peter,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“It did.”

Frederick laughed. He had not expected to. It came out of him all at once and then stopped, and Mrs Hartigan looked at him across the table and said nothing, and passed him the red cabbage again, though he had not finished the first lot.

---

Afterwards, Mr Hartigan went to bed, because it was nearly nine and the depot opened at five. Kate took her phone to her room. Mrs Hartigan washed and Theo dried and Frederick put away, because he knew where everything went in this kitchen, which was more than he could say for any kitchen at Columbia Palace. Then Mrs Hartigan went to find a cardigan, and it was the two of them at the table, with the radio from Milwaukee playing something with an accordion in it, very low.

Theo had a bag of the bad sweets from the corner shop, the sour ones, and pushed it across.

Frederick took one and didn’t eat it.

“Theo.”

“Mm.”

“My father’s going to ask what it would take.”

Theo was looking at the bag. He didn’t look up.

“What what would take?”

“To stop being King.” Frederick turned the sweet over on the table. “He’s going to ask all of them. Every realm. What they’d each have to do. Tomorrow, I think. And I’m going to say it, because he can’t.”

He waited. The accordion on the radio went on. Somewhere below them a door banged and somebody laughed on the stairs.

Theo had never once asked him about the Crown. Not what it was like, not what his father was like, not what would happen. Frederick had noticed it the first month and had never said anything, and he understood now, sitting at the table, that it had been the best thing anybody had ever done for him, and that he was about to make Theo stop.

Theo picked a sweet out of the bag and looked at it. Then he looked up, and he had the face he had in math when he had got to the answer before the teacher and was deciding whether to say.

“Okay, Freddie,” he said. “Eat your dinner.”

Frederick looked at his plate, which was empty, because he had eaten his dinner, all of it, an hour ago, and the red cabbage twice.

Then he understood, and put the sweet in his mouth, and ate it.

It was horrible. It always was. Theo took another one and they sat there with the accordion and the sour sweets until Mrs Hartigan came back in her cardigan and looked at the two of them and said, “Bed, both of you. School,” in a voice that meant the same in English and in German, and Frederick went down the four flights and out to the car, where Castellanos was waiting with his newspaper.

“Good evening, sir?”

“Yes,” said Frederick, and found that it was.