A Paper Royal Highness

Anson came at ten, which was an hour before his time, and did not take off his coat.

Albert was at his table by the window with the morning’s letters, and Eos on the hearthrug, and the fog standing in the square outside so thick that the plane trees in the garden were only darker places in it; and he looked at Anson’s face, and at the coat, and put down his pen.

“There was a boy in the Palace last night, sir,” Anson said. “In the north wing. The night porter found him at about one o’clock, going round with his lantern, and they have had him at the Home Office this morning before the Council. Lord Normanby sent me word, so that you should not read it first in the newspapers.” He stopped. “He was under a sofa, sir. In Her late Majesty’s dressing room.”

Albert did not say anything for a moment. Then he asked, quite steadily, what else.

There was not very much else. The boy’s name was Jones; he was sixteen, or said so, the son of a tailor in Westminster; and he was the same boy, it seemed, who had been found in the Palace two years ago, before Albert’s time, with his face blacked, and tried for it, and let off because the jury thought him only curious. He had come over the garden wall from Constitution Hill on the Monday night, and got in at a window, and had been in the house, he said, ever since, in a house with forty servants in it, eating what he could find in the kitchens at night and lying up in the day. He had gone everywhere. He said that he had sat upon the throne. He said that he had been in all the rooms on the north side, through the door from the back passage that the housemaids had used in the spring, which nobody had thought to lock because there was nothing in those rooms that anybody could want; and when the Council asked him why, he said that he had wished to see them, and particularly the dressing room of Her late Majesty, so that he could write a book.

“A book,” said Albert.

“So he says, sir. The Council could make nothing of him. Two doctors have seen him and cannot say whether he is mad.” Anson hesitated. “He took nothing, sir. That is what they keep coming back to. Two years ago he took a sword and some linen. This time he took nothing at all.”

Albert sat looking at the fog for a while. Then he got up.

“I should like the carriage,” he said. “The close carriage. Not by the Hill.”

Anson looked at him. “Is that wise, sir?”

“No,” said Albert, and went to get his coat.

---

They went by Grosvenor Place and Pimlico, with the high brick wall of the Palace garden going by on the left in the fog for what seemed a very long time, and in at the gate by the Mews; and the Master of the Household met him in the yard, bareheaded, in the cold, a civil anxious man who had been the Queen’s and had not yet been told whose he was now, and who had plainly been warned by somebody that His Royal Highness was coming, and plainly not been told why.

Albert did not tell him. He asked to be taken to the north side, and was taken.

The house was very cold. He had forgotten how large it was, and how new, and how badly it was warmed; he had lived in it for four months, in the spring, and had complained of the chimneys every week of the four, and she had laughed at him and said that he would have complained of the chimneys in Paradise. There were no fires now except in the offices. They went up by a back stair and along a passage that smelt of damp plaster and camphor and shut rooms, with the Master going ahead with a candle, though it was eleven in the morning, because the shutters on the north side had been closed since the end of June and nobody had had any orders to open them. Their feet sounded on the boards. Somewhere a long way off a door banged, and the Master jumped, and begged His Royal Highness’s pardon.

The door from the back passage was a plain door, painted white, of the kind that servants use. The Master unlocked it. It had been locked that morning, he said, by the Lord Chamberlain’s order; it would be locked from now on; His Majesty had been very much displeased. Albert said nothing. He waited while the Master opened the shutters of the nearest window, and the grey light came in, and he went in.

It was her dressing room. He had known that it would be, and it was nevertheless a shock, as cold water is a shock although you have seen it in the jug. Everything was under holland. The dressing table was a white shape against the wall, and the glass above it was covered with a cloth, and the chairs were white shapes, and the sofa under the window was a long white shape, with its cover pulled crooked at one end and dragged half off, where somebody had crawled under it and been dragged out. There was dust on the floor. It lay grey and even over the boards and the rug, the dust of five months, all over the room; and through it, from the door to the sofa, and from the sofa to the dressing table, and from the dressing table to the other door, the one that went through to her bedroom, ran the boy’s footmarks, like the marks of a bird in snow.

“I’ll wait outside, sir, if I may,” said the Master, who was not a fool; and went, and drew the door to.

---

Albert stood for some time in the middle of the room, in his greatcoat, with his hat in his hand.

Then he did what he would have done at Bonn, in the lecture room or the laboratory, if he had been shown a thing that he did not understand: he looked at it. He knelt down on the dusty boards by the sofa and lifted the cover and looked under it. There was not much to see. There was a place in the dust where the boy had lain, long and narrow, the shape of a thin body on its side, with the knees drawn up; and a crust of bread; and a stub of tallow candle, not lit, which must have come from the kitchens; and on the boards by the wall, where the boy’s head would have been, three or four scratches, very fine, in the wood, which Albert looked at for a long time before he saw that they were letters, and that they were not finished. V I C. Somebody had begun to scratch the name with a pin, lying on his side in the dark under the sofa, and had stopped, or been interrupted, or fallen asleep.

He knelt there looking at it until his knees hurt.

He found that he was not angry with the boy. He had expected to be. He had come across London in the fog expecting to be very angry indeed, with the boy and with the night porter and the Lord Chamberlain and the King, and with whoever was responsible for doors in back passages; and he was not, or not with the boy. The boy had wanted to see. Everybody in England had wanted to see. There had been a line of carriages halfway down the Mall on the evening of the tenth of June, of people who had wanted to know; and there had been London standing in silence along the Hill on the night of the twenty-ninth, to see her go; and every one of them, he supposed, had wondered at some time since what the rooms were like where she had lived and died, and what was in them, and whether anybody went there now. Nobody went there. He had not gone. He had arranged his routes for five months so as not to pass within sight of the wall. And a tailor’s son of sixteen had climbed it, and had found the door that nobody had thought to lock, and had come in here, and lain under her sofa in the dark for two nights, and begun to scratch her name on the boards with a pin; and had taken nothing whatever away.

Somebody would say, he supposed, that the boy had been sent. Somebody said that, now, of every boy.

He got up, and dusted his knees, and went to the dressing table.

The boy had lifted the cover. It was folded back at one corner, neatly, as a careful servant might have folded it, and under it the things were as he remembered them, because nobody, it seemed, had had the heart to put them away: her brushes, with the silver backs, and the little tortoiseshell comb, and the scent bottle with the gold stopper that her mother had given her, and a pincushion, and a book face down with a ribbon in it, which he did not pick up, because he knew what it was. Everything was there. Everything was covered with the same grey bloom of dust, very fine and even, except in one place, on the silver back of the nearer brush, where there was a small clean mark, the shape of the end of a finger, where the boy had touched it, once, and put it down.

Albert stood and looked at the mark for a long time. Then he took his handkerchief, and wiped the brush clean, the whole of the back of it, carefully, until the silver shone; and laid it down again where it had been; and drew the cover back over all of it, and smoothed it, and turned away.

He did not go through into the bedroom. The door stood shut. The boy’s footmarks went up to it and through it and came back, and he looked at them, and at the door, and did not open it. He had said goodbye to her in that room. He did not need to go into it again, and he did not think he ever would.

When he came out the Master was waiting in the passage with the candle, which had gone out.

“What are His Majesty’s orders for these rooms?” Albert asked.

“None, sir. His Majesty has given none, since June. The Lord Chamberlain’s orders were that they should be shut, and nothing touched, until His Majesty gave directions. Nobody has been in them.”

“Except the boy.”

“Except the boy, sir.”

“Then they will be kept so,” said Albert, “until somebody gives an order.” He put on his hat. “Thank you. I shall not need to come again.”

He went home the same way, by Pimlico, with the wall going by in the fog on the right hand now; and at Belgrave Square he went up to his room and washed his hands, a long time, in cold water, though there was nothing on them but dust.

---

The Gazette came on Tuesday the fifteenth, with the breakfast.

Anson brought it up himself, which he did not usually do, and laid it on the table beside Albert’s plate, folded open at the page; and went and stood at the window with his back to the room, looking out at the square, where it had begun to freeze in the night and the gardener was sanding the paths.

Whitehall, December 14, 1840.

The King has been pleased, by Warrant under His Majesty’s Royal Sign Manual, to revoke and determine the Royal Warrant bearing date the 4th day of March last, whereby Her late Majesty was pleased to give and grant unto His Royal Highness Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha place, pre-eminence and precedence next to Her Majesty.

That was all. It was three lines, at the foot of a column, above a list of bankrupts.

He read it twice, as he read everything that mattered, once to know what it was and once to know what it said. Then he looked through the rest of his letters, which had come up with the Gazette on the same tray, and went through them a second time, more slowly, to be sure; and there was nothing from St James’s. There was nothing from anybody about it at all. The King had taken it away as he had let it stand, for six months, without a word.

“It was a warrant, sir,” said Anson from the window, without turning round. “Not letters patent. I looked into it, in August, after Lord Melbourne came. Everybody called it the patent, but it was never under the Great Seal; it was a warrant under her sign manual, countersigned by Lord Normanby, and what one sign manual has done another may undo. Lord Normanby will have countersigned this one too. He could not have refused, sir. It is entirely within the prerogative.”

“I know,” said Albert.

He did know. He had called it the patent himself, all through the spring, because she had: your patent, she had said, at breakfast, on the morning it was done, and pushed it across the table to him in its envelope, as one gives a present, very pleased and a little defiant, with her colour up. The Lords had struck his precedence out of the Bill in February, with the Duke of Wellington being perfectly civil throughout and her uncle of Hanover refusing his consent to it in a letter that everybody in London had heard about; and she had been angrier than he had ever seen her, and had said that she would do it herself, then, and had done it. There, she had said. Now they may say what they like. He had laughed at her, and kissed her, and put it in his drawer, and not thought of it again for weeks together, because he did not care about precedence and never had, and she knew that perfectly well. She had not done it for the precedence. She had done it so that the Lords and her uncle should see that she could.

And now her uncle had seen to it that they should see he could; and that was all it was.

He found, when he looked for it, that he did not mind about the precedence. He had never gone anywhere since June where it would have signified. He had not been to a levee or a drawing room, or a Council, or a dinner, or to church except to sit at the back of the nearest one on Sunday mornings; he would walk, now, if he ever walked anywhere, behind the King’s brothers, and the King’s son, and the King’s nephew, and very likely behind the Archbishop, and it would make no difference whatever to anything he did, because he did nothing. What he minded was smaller than that, and he had not expected it. It was the last thing she had given him that anybody could take away. Everything else she had given him was in the drawer of his table, or in his head, where nobody could reach it. This had been on paper, and the King had found the paper.

A paper Royal Highness, the King had called him, in February, before the wedding. Albert had laughed at that too, when Stockmar told him. He thought, sitting at the breakfast table with the Gazette, that it had been a good deal more exact than he had supposed.

A note came from Melbourne at noon, by hand, in the large untidy writing that he knew from the envelopes on her table in the spring.

Sir, It was put to us as a matter for His Majesty’s pleasure, and we were advised that it was one. I could not have prevented it, and I did not try. I am very sorry for it. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Royal Highness’s most faithful servant, Melbourne.

Albert read it, and thought that it was a very honest note, and very like the man, and that it was the only one he would receive; and put it in the drawer with the others.

---

The frost came down in the week before Christmas, out of a clear sky, with no wind.

He kept a thermometer outside his window, on a bracket, as he had kept one at Bonn and at the Rosenau, and read it every morning at seven when Cart brought the hot water, and wrote it in a little book with the day and the wind and the look of the sky; it was a habit, and he kept up his habits now as a man in a boat keeps bailing. One morning it said nine degrees. He looked at it twice, and tapped the glass, and it went on saying nine. That was twenty-three degrees of frost by the English reckoning, and more than ten below by the Réaumur he had been brought up on; it was colder than he had known it in London, or than anybody in the house could remember, and Cart said that the water in the jugs in the attics had frozen solid in the night and cracked two of them.

The Serpentine froze. By the Saturday it would bear, and half London went out on it.

He walked over to see it in the afternoon, with Anson and Eos, across the Park the far way, by the barracks, under a sky as hard and pale as glass, with the sun going down red behind the trees of Kensington Gardens before four. The whole long water was black with people. There were skaters on it in their hundreds, gentlemen and boys and soldiers from the barracks and girls in red cloaks, going round and round in the great slow circles that skaters make, with their arms folded or their hands behind their backs; and men selling hot chestnuts and gin at the edge, on the ice itself, at little braziers; and the Humane Society’s men walking up and down by the receiving house on the north bank, with their ladders and their ropes and their boat hooks, in case of accidents, looking at the ice with professional disapproval. There was a noise that he had not heard since he left Coburg, and had not known that he had missed: the long rasping ring of a great many skates on hard ice, and under it, now and then, out in the middle, a deep low sound like a cannon a very long way off, which was the ice settling.

He stood on the bank with his hands in his pockets and watched it until the light went.

He had skated all his life. He had skated on the ponds below the Rosenau with Ernest from the time they could stand, every winter, until their tutor came down to the bank with a lantern to shout them in; and on the Itz, when it froze, which it did not every year, all the way down to the town; and at Bonn on the Rhine meadows, with the students, by torchlight. He was good at it. It was one of the few things he had ever done for pleasure that he had not first decided would be useful. And in February, in the first week they were married, she had stood at the window of her sitting room at the Palace, the one that looked down on the garden, and seen the skin of ice on the lake there, and said that next winter he should skate on it and she would watch him from the window; and he had said that he would teach her; and she had said that the Queen did not fall down in front of her servants, and then that perhaps she would, if he held her very tight. The lake in the Palace garden would be frozen now. It would bear by tomorrow. Nobody would skate on it.

Out on the ice a boy went down, laughing, and was hauled up by his friends, and went on. A man came by on the bank with a basket of skates to hire, and looked at Albert, and at his black, and said, Skates, sir? Very fine ice; and then looked again, and took off his hat, and went on without saying anything more. Albert did not hire skates. He did not think it was a thing that a man six months a widower could do in Hyde Park, in front of half London, whatever the Réaumur said. He stood and watched until the sun was down and the cold came up out of the ground, and Eos was shivering against his leg, and the lamps were being lit along the Knightsbridge road; and then he went home, the far way, and did not speak the whole length of the Park.

Anson walked beside him, and did not speak either. Anson was a good young man.

---

Stockmar’s letter came on the Monday after, the twenty-first, from Coburg, in the small crabbed German hand that Albert had been reading since he was a boy, eleven pages, close-written, as all Stockmar’s letters were; and Albert read it at his table by the window after breakfast, with the frost ferns on the glass, all through, twice, and then sat for a long time with it in his hands.

It said a great many things. Stockmar was a doctor before he was anything else, and wrote like one, beginning with the symptoms and proceeding without mercy to the diagnosis. It said that the Duke was well, and Ernest was well, and that Ernest was spending a great deal more money than he had, as usual, and that the Rosenau had been shut for the winter, and the snow was deep at Coburg and the boar had come down into the beech woods above the house. It said that the Duke was angry with the King of Hanover on Albert’s behalf, and had said so to everybody in Coburg, which would do no good; and that Stockmar was not angry with the King at all, because the King was behaving exactly as Stockmar had expected, and was, in his way, a great convenience.

You asked me in August what you should do, and I told you to wait. You have waited. You have been seen to stay, which was the purpose of waiting, and there is no other purpose in it. Nobody can now say that you ran away. Nobody can say that you did not grieve, or that you did not try to be of use, or that you left her country in a temper because her uncle was uncivil to you. You have stayed six months, in black, and done nothing that anybody could reproach, and given no trouble, and that was what was required, and it is done.

Now consider what is not required. The King will not employ you. He cannot, without confessing that his niece chose well, and he will not confess it. His ministers will not employ you, because they do not know what you are, and the King has told them by his silence, these six months, that you are nothing. If he takes away the precedence she gave you, as I think he will before long, do not be angry. It will only be the King saying aloud what he has been saying all along, and it will make the thing easier. Parliament will pay you thirty thousand pounds a year for the rest of your life to be nothing, which is generous, and which you will find, after a few years, that you cannot bear. I have seen it before. I sat up with your uncle at Claremont, and I watched him for fourteen years after it, in that house, with nothing to do, until the Belgians invented a kingdom that nobody else would take. You have not got fourteen years to spare, and there is no kingdom.

You are twenty-one. A man who does nothing at twenty-one is preparing very thoroughly to do nothing at forty. Come home. Your father is not well, whatever he says, and your brother is not serious, whatever he says; and there is a great deal to be done in a small country by a man who knows how things ought to be done and is willing to do them without being thanked. It will not be what you were going to do. Nothing will be. But it will be something, and it will be yours.

Ask the King’s leave in writing, in the proper form, and do not explain yourself. A man who explains himself to a King invites him to refuse.

And at the end, under his name, in a smaller hand, as if he had thought of it after the letter was sealed and broken the seal to add it:

She would have told you the same. She would have told you more quickly, and with less Latin, and been very cross with you for needing to be told.

Albert folded the letter, and put it in the drawer with the others, with Melbourne’s note and the Gazette; and then took it out again, and read the last two lines a third time, and put it back.

---

The Duchess had a tree.

He had not known that she would. She had said nothing about it; but on Christmas Eve, when he came down at six, the doors of the drawing room were shut, and the footmen were standing outside them looking secretive, and there was a smell on the stair that he had not smelt since the last Christmas Eve, at home, when he was twenty and engaged, and her letters came every week: hot wax and fir and burnt sugar. And then the Duchess came down in her black, with her hair done and a little colour in her face, and took his arm without a word, and the footmen opened the doors.

It was a small tree, a fir from Claremont, which was her brother’s, no taller than a man, on a round table in the middle of the room, as they always were at home, with the wax tapers lit on every branch and the sugar things hung among them, little coloured figures and gilt walnuts and paper roses, and the light of it going up the walls and the long windows and the gilt frames of the pictures; and on the tables round it, as there always were, the presents laid out, each on its own white cloth, for each person in the house. The servants came in at a quarter past six, in a line, and were given theirs, and bowed, and curtseyed, and went out again, pleased and shy; the Duchess’s German maid wept a little; Cart, who was a Protestant from the Vaud and disapproved of trees, said in his Vaud French that it was very handsome. And then the doors were shut again, and the two of them were alone in the room with the tree.

“I had one every year,” the Duchess said, “at Kensington. For her. From the time she was a baby. Two trees, when she was older, one for her and one for me, and the presents round them. She loved it more than anything in the year.” She was looking at the tree, not at him. “I thought that I would not have one this year. And then I thought that you were in a strange country, and it was Christmas, and that you had nobody here to have a tree for you but me.”

It was the first time she had spoken of her. In six months, at that long table, every night, they had talked about Coburg, carefully, as two people talk who are crossing a frozen river and do not look down. The water was frozen now in earnest; he had seen it bear half London; and he found, standing in the warm room with the tree, that the ice held.

They talked about her. They sat on the sofa by the tree, with the tapers burning down and dripping and the sugar figures turning slowly in the warm air, and they talked about her for an hour, in German, in the soft Franconian of the place, both of them, and neither of them broke down, or not much, or not for long. The Duchess told him about the trees at Kensington; and about a Christmas when Victoria was seven and had been given a doll’s house and had wept because it had no kitchen; and about the drawing on his table, and the summer it was made. He told her about the window at the Palace, and the lake, and the skating; and about the morning of the warrant, and there, and now they may say what they like; and the Duchess laughed at that, with the tears running down her face, and said that it was exactly like her, exactly, and that she had said the same thing at nine, about a pony.

Then he told her that he had decided to go home.

She was quiet for a while. A taper had burned down to its holder near the top of the tree, and she leaned over and pinched it out with her fingers, as she must have done at Kensington every year for eighteen years, without looking.

“When my husband died,” she said, “at Sidmouth, in the January, she was eight months old. I was thirty-three, and a foreigner, and I had no money, and I could not speak the language well; and everybody in England told me to go home to Amorbach. His brothers told me so. The King told me so. It would have been the sensible thing. I stayed.” She put her hands together in her lap. “I stayed because I had her. That was the whole of it. There was nothing else in England for me, nothing at all, and there never was, afterwards, except her.” She turned, and looked at him at last, with her tired kind face that had so much of her daughter’s in it, about the eyes. “You have not got her, Albert. Go home.”

He said that he would.

He wrote to the King that night, in his own room, at the table by the window, with the frost thick on the glass and the drawing in its gilt frame beside the inkstand and Eos asleep on his feet. He wrote it in English, in his best hand, which was a good deal better than his spoken English, once; and he did not explain himself.

Sir,

I have the honour to request Your Majesty’s gracious permission to return to Germany, to my father’s house, at such time in the coming month as may be agreeable to Your Majesty.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and obedient servant,

Albert.

He read it over, and sealed it, and laid it on the table for Anson to take to St James’s after the holiday. Then he sat for a while by the window, in the cold, with the candle, looking at the drawing: the child on the garden seat, with her portfolio, considering whether to obey.

“I am going home,” he told her, in German. “You would have told me sooner.”

Below in the square the frost was so hard and the night so still that he could hear, a long way off, a clock striking twelve; and under it, very faint, from the direction of the Park, he thought he could hear the ice on the Serpentine settling in the cold, like a gun a very long way off.