Dame M

He told the Private Secretary first, because the Private Secretary was first.

At half past seven, in the study at the back of the first floor with the window that faced the wrong way, with the overnight boxes on the desk in a row, shut. He opened the green one and did it and shut it, and opened the black one and did it and shut it, and then, before he opened the red one, which was the Realm’s and was always last because it was always longest, he said:

“I’m going to be at the Hartigans’ this weekend.”

“Yes, sir.”

“From Friday at four to Monday morning. Sleeping there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s a bet.”

The Private Secretary looked at the wall over the desk, where there was a small dark oil painting of a horse that had been his grandfather’s and that nobody had ever been able to identify, the horse or the painter.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Sergeant Castellanos mentioned it last night at a quarter to ten. He mentioned it to me in the corridor by the lift, and then he mentioned it again, at greater length, in my office.” A pause. “I understand there is a napkin.”

“There’s a napkin.”

“And a clause concerning the boxes.”

“They come to the flat. I do them at the kitchen table. With the family there.” Frederick opened the red box. “One open at a time. That’s still the rule. But they’re in the room.”

The Private Secretary considered the horse.

“There is nothing in any realm’s law, sir, about who may be in the room,” he said. “Only about what may be open in it.” He said it as if he had been thinking about it since a quarter to ten last night, which Frederick was quite sure he had. “I shall bring them up.”

“There are four flights.”

“I have been told, sir. The stairs were measured in 2028.” The Private Secretary did not change his expression at all. “Fifty-six steps, in four flights of fourteen, with a landing at each, and a window on the fourth. The lift was measured as well. It is a lift for six persons or four hundred and fifty kilograms, whichever is the sooner.”

“It’s got a notice on it, sometimes.”

“Then I shall use the stairs, sir,” said the Private Secretary, “sometimes.”

---

He told his mother at breakfast, which was not news to her, and she listened to all of it anyway with her coffee going cold and her Swedish folder shut, and at the end she said:

“She’s very good, Anneliese. On the telephone.”

“What did you talk about?”

“You.” She opened the folder. “And the stairs. And Peter’s shifts. And the spring.” She turned a page. “She speaks the most extraordinary German. It’s like talking to my great-grandmother. She said Schlafbank for sofa, which I don’t think anybody has said in Germany since about 1880.” She looked at him over the folder. “I liked her enormously. I’ve always liked her enormously. I think it’s the first time she’s let me.”

“Did she really say you were envious?”

“I am envious,” said his mother. “I’m the Queen of Sweden. I’ve never slept on a sofa in my life. When I was nineteen I wanted to go interrailing with my friends and the Court said no, and I’ve minded ever since.” She went back to the folder. “Ring at nine. I mean it.”

---

Dame M was waiting for him outside the small dining room.

She was standing in the gallery by the window with her folder under her arm and a card in her hand, and she did not hold the card out, which was how he knew it was serious. She held it at her side.

“Sir. A moment.”

“Yes.”

“In the library, if you would.”

He followed her along the gallery to the library, which at a quarter past eight on a Thursday in February was cold and dim and smelled of leather and the radiators that had just come on, and she went to the long table under the window and did not sit down, and he did not either.

She was sixty, very upright, in the grey suit. She had been Master of the Household since he was three. Before that she had been a captain in the Navy for twenty-two years, and she still stood the way captains stood on bridges in photographs, with her weight even on both feet and her hands still. He had seen her stand like that in front of Prime Ministers and Archbishops and a German Emperor, and once, in October, in front of a man from London with a tape measure who had wanted to measure her for a robe she was not going to wear.

“I have three questions, sir,” said Dame M.

“Yes.”

“I shan’t ask whether you’re going. You’re going. Sergeant Castellanos has made that perfectly clear, and Her Majesty made it clearer at ten o’clock last night on the internal line, and I have also had the advantage this morning of a telephone call from Mrs Hartigan.”

“Mrs Hartigan rang you?”

“At seven.” Dame M’s face did not move. “To ask how many towels the King uses. I told her that I did not know, and that I would find out, and she said not to trouble, she would assume two, like anybody.” A pause. “It is the first time in fourteen years that anybody has rung this house to ask me something about the King that I did not know.”

---

“The first question,” said Dame M, “is the boxes. I gather that is settled. The Private Secretary will carry them. I have asked him whether he would like a porter, and he has declined in terms I shall not repeat.”

“He said fifty-six steps.”

“He measured them himself, sir. In 2028. With a clicker.” She did not smile. “The second question is the Prime Minister. His audience is tonight, at six, here, as usual. Next week is next week. Nothing in the bet concerns a Thursday, and I have checked.” She moved the card in her hand very slightly. “The third question is the Standard.”

He had known it would be.

He had lain awake for some time last night, after the car, thinking about it, and had not got anywhere.

“The Royal Standard flies when the sovereign is in the building,” said Dame M, “and at no other time. That is the rule, and it has been the rule since 1841. From four o’clock tomorrow, when you leave this building, until eight on Monday morning, when you return to the Ellicott side of the river on the twenty-two, the sovereign will not be in this building.” She looked at him. “The Standard will therefore come down.”

“Yes.”

“At four o’clock tomorrow, when you go out of the door.”

“Yes.”

“And the Axis will see it come down, sir. As the Axis has seen everything that flagstaff has done for a hundred and eighty-nine years. On Saturday morning eleven thousand people will walk past the Palace on their way to the shops and look up and see a flagstaff with nothing on it, and by noon somebody will have rung a radio station.”

“Can’t it just stay up?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would be untrue,” said Dame M.

---

There was a pause in the cold library.

“That is not my question,” said Dame M. “My question is not whether it comes down here. It comes down here. My question is whether it goes up there.”

He looked at her.

“There?”

“The Standard flies where the sovereign is in residence, sir. Not only here. Here because here is where you usually are. When your father went to Ottawa, it flew over Rideau Hall. When you went to London in November, it flew over the building you slept in.” She did not consult the card. “I have spent the night with the regulations. They are quite clear about a palace, a castle, a vice-regal residence, a hotel, a ship and a private house in which the sovereign is a guest. They do not mention a rented flat on the fourth floor of a block in the north-east with a lift for six persons or four hundred and fifty kilograms.”

“Theo said no Household upstairs.”

“A flag is not the Household, sir,” said Dame M. “A flag is the Crown.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

“I’m not asking you to decide,” said Dame M. “It’s not yours to decide; it’s mine, and the Lord Chamberlain’s, and I have not yet spoken to the Lord Chamberlain, because he is in London and I wished to have an answer before he had a view.” She put the card in her folder without showing it to him. “I’m telling you that it is a question, so that if, on Saturday morning, a man arrives at the Hartigans’ door with a long thin parcel, you will not be surprised.”

“Dame M.”

“Sir.”

“Please don’t send a man with a long thin parcel.”

“I will do my best, sir,” said Dame M, and for a moment, at the corner of her mouth, something happened that on any other woman would have been the beginning of a smile.

---

“There’s one more thing,” said Dame M, at the door, “which is not a question.”

“Yes.”

She opened her folder again and took out a single sheet, typed, old, on paper that had gone faintly yellow at the edges, and held it out to him.

“This is from the Household’s records, sir. It was written in 2027 by the private secretary of the day, after the Household was told that you had been sent home early from the Hartigans’ on a school night for the second time. It was filed. It has never been read by anybody but me.” She held it while he read it. “It will be released under the ordinary archive rules in about seventy years. I thought you might like to see it before you go.”

It was one paragraph. It was dry, and short, and written in the slightly stiff English of a man who had been trained to write letters to Governors-General.

It is noted for the record that the heir was on Tuesday evening sent home at a quarter past eight, before the end of the meal, by Mrs Hartigan, for having failed to finish his mathematics homework before arriving. He was given a slice of cake to take with him. This is the second such occasion. It is believed that this is the only house in the Realm where it happens. The Household does not propose to intervene.

He read it twice.

“I’d forgotten the cake,” he said.

“I hadn’t,” said Dame M, and took the sheet back, and put it in the folder, and went out.

---

Bridget did not say anything.

He went down to the kitchen at a quarter to eight, before the car, because he always did on Thursdays, for no reason except that it was Thursday, and Bridget was at the range with her back to him, and she had clearly been told, because she did not turn round, and she did not say tea’s in the pot, and she banged a saucepan down on the hob with a force that rattled the plates on the dresser.

“Bridget.”

Nothing. The saucepan.

“It’s three nights.”

“I heard.”

“Mrs Hartigan’s a very good cook.”

Bridget turned round.

She looked at him with her hands on her hips and a wooden spoon in one of them, and her face was doing something he had not seen it do since the morning in October when his coronation robes had arrived in three boxes from London and the man from the robe-makers had walked through her kitchen in outdoor shoes.

“I know she is a very good cook,” said Bridget. “I’ve had her apple cake. Dame M brought a piece back in September in a napkin, and I had it, and it was a very good apple cake.” She pointed the spoon at him. “That isn’t the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point,” said Bridget, “is that you have eaten in this kitchen every day of your life that you’ve been in this house since you were four years old, and on Friday you are going to walk out of it with a bag and eat for three days at another woman’s table, by rule, and I am not allowed to send so much as a biscuit.”

“Who said you’re not allowed?”

“The napkin,” said Bridget. “Sergeant Castellanos read it to me. No Household upstairs. I’m Household.” She turned back to the range. “I’ve been Household for thirty years.”

He looked at her back for a moment.

“The napkin says nobody from the Household comes upstairs,” he said carefully. “It doesn’t say anything about a basket.”

Bridget’s back went very still.

“It doesn’t say anything about a basket being left on a landing,” said Frederick. “By somebody who doesn’t come in. For the family. Not for me.” He picked up his bag. “Theo would say that’s a loophole. Mrs Hartigan would decide.”

Bridget did not turn round. But the saucepan went down on the hob much more gently, and when he went out of the kitchen door she was standing at the dresser looking at the top shelf, where the big wicker hampers were kept, the ones with the leather straps that had not come down since the summer.

---

Castellanos had a map.

He had it on the front seat of the car when Frederick got in at eight, a sheet of squared paper, hand drawn, in pencil: a block of brown brick, four floors, the stairwell, the lift, the landing with its window, the door of the flat, the street, the depot gates, the bus stop, the corner shop. Four crosses on the street. One cross, circled, at the corner opposite the door.

“That’s the car,” said Castellanos, pointing. “Kimura and me. Twelve on, twelve off, with the night man in between. We sit there. We don’t come up.” He moved his finger to the landing window. “From there, if I stand on the bonnet, I can see the landing window. I’m not going to stand on the bonnet.”

“You don’t have to do this. You could go home. There’s a whole detail.”

“There’s a whole detail,” agreed Castellanos, and started the engine, and pulled out past the policeman at the side gate. “And there’s me.”

---

At six that evening Lord Whitlock came for the audience, as he did every Thursday, in the small study on the first floor, in the chair he always sat in, with a folder. He was twenty-seven, for two months more, and still looked younger than most of the Commons’ clerks, and he went through the week in forty minutes in his quick, dry, careful voice: the Estimate; a bill in committee; a question from the Opposition about the coronation’s cost, which had been answered.

At the end he closed the folder.

“Sir,” he said. “Before I go. I’m told there’s a napkin.”

Frederick looked at him.

“I had a call from Dame M at four,” said Lord Whitlock. “She wished me to be aware that the sovereign would be resident from tomorrow evening at an address in the north-east of the District that she did not give me, and that if I needed him I should ring a number that turned out to be a kitchen.” He stood up, and put the folder under his arm. “She asked me whether, in my view, the Royal Standard should fly over a block of flats.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that I had no view, sir, because it was not a matter on which the Crown takes advice from its ministers, and that I was very glad of it.” He went to the door. “I lost a bet at King’s once. My second year. Three nights in a tent on the lawn on Morningside Heights in November, by a set of rules written on a menu. I lasted two.” He opened the door. “I’m not advising you, sir. I’m only telling you what happened to me.”

“What happened on the third night?”

“It rained,” said Lord Whitlock, and went out.