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The sunflowers had gone from the railings in October, when the frost came. In November there had been nothing. This morning there was one bunch of holly, tied to the railings by the main doors with red ribbon, and a card, the first card since June.

GO HOME SAFE. FROM THE SIXTH FLOOR NIGHT STAFF.

He saw it from the car at three. Castellanos, driving, slowed down so that he could read it twice.

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The sixth floor had been emptied of everything that was his father’s.

Not emptied. Packed. The corner room with the two windows had four cardboard boxes in it, taped, with C.P. NORTH WING on them in marker in Joanne’s hand. The bed stripped. The machines on their stand gone two weeks ago, one at a time, as they were not needed. The plastic chair with the wooden arms still by the river window, because nobody had known whether to pack it.

His father was in the black wheelchair in his coat, with the stick across his knees, looking out of the river window.

“Papa.”

His father turned his head.

“Ready,” he said. It was not a question.

Niamh came in behind Frederick with a bag over her shoulder and her coat on. She did not work Fridays. She had swapped with Joanne, she said, for the last one, and then she said that it was not the last one, because the Household had asked whether she would come to the north wing three days a week until March, and she had said yes before they finished.

“I’m to have the room by the kitchen,” said Niamh. “Dame M showed me on Tuesday. It’s got a window on the garden and a kettle.” She looked at the Duke. “I said I’d need the kettle.”

His father’s mouth moved at one corner.

“Tea,” he said. “Good.”

Frederick looked at the plastic chair.

“Can I have it?”

Niamh looked at him.

“The chair,” said Frederick. “Mine. By the window.” He did not know why he had asked. “If nobody needs it.”

“It belongs to the hospital, sir,” said Niamh. “It’s a hundred and forty dollars new and the Trust has nine hundred of them.” She looked at it. “I’ll ask Joanne to lose the paperwork.”

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They went down in the lift with the chair folded in the corner of it, and the four boxes, and the stick, and his father in the wheelchair, and Niamh, and the police officer from outside the corner room, who had come to see them to the car and had stood in the lift at attention all the way down.

At the main doors the night staff were waiting. Six of them, in their coats, off shift or about to be on it, by the holly on the railings, in the cold. One of them, a man with a beard, lifted his hand.

His father, in the chair, lifted the stick about two inches.

Then the car.

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Columbia Palace had a lift. It had been put in in 1962 for Ernest the Fourth’s state visit, which had happened in the end without it, and it had been used since by the kitchen for the trays and by Dame M never, and it went from the ground floor of the north wing to the first and nowhere else, and it was small and panelled and creaked.

His father did not need it. The room was on the ground floor.

The morning room. The room where Lord Whitlock had been put to wait in September last year, and where Frederick had recorded the message in October by the red light, at the empty table. Dame M had had it made into a bedroom in a week: the table gone, a bed in its place by the window over the garden, a chair beside the bed, the portrait from the year Frederick was born, his father at the window with his hand on the back of a chair, still on the wall, where it had always been. They had not moved it.

His father looked at it from the doorway.

He looked at it. His own face at sixty-six, at a window, looking at something to the left of the painter.

“Him,” said his father. “Again.”

“Do you want it moved?”

His father considered the portrait.

“No.” A breath. “Company.”

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He had reigned from this house for fifty-six years. Frederick worked it out in the doorway, and it did not seem possible. Fifty-six years of boxes with THE KING on them, carried up the stone stairs of the north wing and out again, of papers signed and commissions read and messages that went out from this house in his name, on the Axis, in the Realm. And he had never once slept in it. He had come for a night at a time, four or five times a reign, and slept in the state bedrooms on the east front with the Standard over them, and gone back to London.

Tonight he would sleep in the morning room on the ground floor of the north wing, with a kettle down the corridor and a nurse with a plait and a portrait of himself for company.

“Papa. You’ve never lived here.”

His father looked at him.

“No.” The breath. “Visited.” A longer one. “You. Lived.”

He turned the chair himself, with his hands on the wheels, slowly, and looked out of the window at the garden, which was grey and bare, with frost still white in the shadow of the wall at four in the afternoon.

“Now. Me.”

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At four Bridget had the kitchen ready.

She had not said so. She had not said anything. But when Niamh wheeled his father in from the corridor the long table had been moved, a foot, from where it had stood for as long as Frederick had been alive, so that the end nearest the range had room for a chair with wheels; and at that end, where a chair had been, there was no chair, only space, and a cushion on the bench at the side; and on the table, at the place, a cup and saucer, white, plain, no crest, and a small jug of milk, and no sugar.

His father looked at the table.

Bridget was at the range with her back to them.

“Thank. You,” said his father, to her back.

“It’s only a table, sir,” said Bridget, to the range. “It was in the wrong place anyway.”

Niamh put the chair at the end of the table and set the brake. Frederick took the plastic chair with the wooden arms out of the corner where the driver had left it, unfolded it, and put it beside his father’s, at the corner of the table, where the bench met the end. It looked wrong in the kitchen. Plastic and wood among the scrubbed pine and the copper. He sat in it.

Bridget poured the tea. She put a plate of something on the table by the cup without a word. Shortbread. She did not look at anybody, and went back to the sink.

His father looked round the kitchen.

The dresser with the plates. The cake tin. The radio beside it, small and brown, on, very low. The window over the sink with Bridget’s back in front of it. The range, black and enormous, older than the railways. And over the range, the clock.

His father looked at the clock for a while. Then at his own wrist, where Niamh had put his watch back on in October.

“Clock,” said his father. “Slow.”

“Four minutes,” said Frederick.

At the sink, Bridget did not turn round.

“It’s been four minutes slow since before you were King, sir,” she said, to the window. “Since 1969. Mrs Beale had it before me. She said it was slow when she came.”

His father thought about that.

“Fix?”

“No,” said Bridget.

A pause. The radio murmured. The clock said twelve minutes to four, which meant eight.

“Good,” said his father.

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At a quarter to five he opened the blue book on the corner of the kitchen table, beside the shortbread.

Not on his knee. On the table. That was new. He had read it on his knee in a plastic chair on the sixth floor every afternoon for fourteen months, and it was strange to have it flat on scrubbed pine with a cup of tea beside it and his father at the end of the table and Bridget at the sink and the range warm on his left side.

He began, in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station.

“Tomorrow. Saturday. Six fifty-two. The Capitol. From Chicago. Via Pittsburgh.”

Six fifty-two now. They had finished the works at Harpers Ferry in November and the Capitol had come back twelve minutes, and his father had known that too, from the newspaper on a Sunday.

His father marked it. The small movement of the head, less than a nod.

The Crown Limited from Boston. The locals from the Maryland side. The evening train from Richmond.

At the sink Bridget had stopped moving. She was standing with her hands on the edge of it, not running the tap, the way she stood when she was listening to the radio, except that the radio was very low and she was not listening to the radio.

He read all of them. To the end. Eleven thirty-eight. The local, from Alexandria. All stations.

He closed the book.

His father sat at the end of the table with the empty cup in front of him and looked round the kitchen again: at the range, the dresser, the clock, Bridget’s back, the window over the garden, now dark. Then at Frederick, in the plastic chair, at the corner.

The breath. The hold.

“Home,” said his father.

At the sink, with great care, Bridget turned on the tap.