The Advice

Columbia Palace, New Westminster Sunday 14 January, after nine

Dear Alexander,

Happy birthday. I am writing it on a Sunday and you will read it on a Thursday, because I have asked the man at your Embassy to hold this until the bag that gets to you on the eighteenth, and he said that he would, in the voice of a man who has been told to hold things before and has never once been told why. So if it has come on any other day, it is his fault, and you can tell your mother.

I looked it up. Your birthday is the day they crowned the first King of Prussia at Königsberg, and the day they proclaimed the Empire, in the middle of a war with France, which I didn’t know until I looked that up as well. So you were born on the birthday of both your jobs. Theo says that is the most German thing he has ever heard, and that it would be like him being born on the day the bus depot opened. I asked him when the bus depot opened. He didn’t know. He said that was the point.

I can’t send you a present in the bag, because Dame M says the bag is for paper and that a King who puts a parcel in a diplomatic bag will be in the newspapers by the weekend, and so will she. So your present is this: I have learned the trains from Berlin to Potsdam. You have one about every ten minutes. That is not a timetable, Alexander. That is showing off. I am not going to learn any more of it, because there is nothing to learn. Every ten minutes a train goes to Potsdam. I think that might be the most German thing I have ever heard, and I’m going to tell Theo he’s lost.

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Things since Solliden, quickly, so that the rest of this is fair.

School started again on the third, the day after we flew home. Mr Abernathy said “Hanover” on the first morning as though there had never been a Christmas, and I said “Here.” Mrs Pruitt has moved us on from circles to similar triangles, which is the same shape at a different size, and I said in the lesson that this was the whole of the personal union, and she said, “Not in my classroom, Frederick,” and wrote it down. I think she is going to use it.

The eight is off the river until March, because of the ice at the edges, so we row on the machines in the boathouse, in a line, facing a wall, at half past six. It is the worst thing in the world and I keep it anyway, because you said especially when it’s inconvenient, and nothing has ever been as inconvenient as a rowing machine facing a wall at half past six in January.

The kitchen table was on the ninth, as promised. Mamma said the papers after a holiday are always the ones everybody wanted off their desks before Christmas, so it was a long Tuesday. There is nothing in them I am allowed to tell you about, and nothing you’d want to read. A great many appointments. A judge in South Africa. The green book has fourteen entries now. Most of them say that something was right. Two say I don’t know.

I read Papa the trains at four, as always. I told him about your birthday. He said nothing for a long time, and then he said, “Königsberg,” quite clearly, and I didn’t know why, and then I worked it out. I said, “Yes, Papa. When he’s sixteen. That’s where they’ll crown him,” and he looked at me for a long time, and said, “Good.” I’ve been thinking about that look ever since. It’s part of why this letter is long.

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Now the thing. It’s the reason this letter is long, and I’m going to say it plainly, because if I don’t I’ll make it a joke and you’ll know.

I promised you on New Year’s Day, from the kitchen at Solliden, that I wouldn’t write one word about it until your birthday, and that on your birthday I’d tell you what I think, once. I’ve kept it. It’s your birthday. This is the once.

You told me in the first letter that you were going to break the rule once, and then I could decide whether you were allowed to break it again. You have broken it a great deal since, and so have I, and we have both pretended each time that it was the first time. This is not the first time. But this is the first time it is about you and not me, and so I am going to say so, and then say it, and you can be as angry as you like.

You told me in December what Falk said to you. That she would back it. That she wasn’t doing it for you. That she knew you hadn’t asked for it, and that was why. I have thought about that every day since you told me. I’ve thought about it on the machine, facing the wall, which is where I do my best thinking now, because there is nothing else to look at.

Here it is.

If they offer it to you, take it.

Not because you want it. I know you don’t, or you think you don’t, or you think you’re not allowed to, which with you is the same thing. Take it because you have been a King for eleven months with your hands tied, and in those eleven months the only thing you were allowed to do was say no and have it written down, and you did, and it was right, and a court said so. You minuted your dissent. Do you know how many people in the history of your family have minuted their dissent at fourteen, against a Council of nine grown-ups, one of them their own mother? I don’t either, but I’m sure it’s not many, and I’m sure most of them were in a book with a bad ending, and yours isn’t.

You’re readier than I am. I don’t mean older, because you’re not, you’re eight months younger and you are going to have that read out to you in every letter I send until I’m forty. I mean you’ve done it. You’ve sat in the room while they decided something in your name that you thought was wrong. You’ve been the person in the photograph with nobody in your shape. You’ve had the five weeks. I’ve had eleven weeks of being told I’m doing very well and a kitchen table on Tuesdays. I haven’t had to say no to anybody. I haven’t had to find out what happens after you do.

And I’ve got till May. That’s the bit I can’t get past. On the second of May I stop having a Regent, because the realms decided sixteen and that was that. And you’ve got till next January, eight months after me, even though you’ve been doing it for eight months longer than I have, because your father died in February and your birthday is in January and nobody wrote the law with both of those in mind. It’s the wrong way round. You know it is. Charlotte knows it is, or she wouldn’t have signed your leave twice. Your mother knows it is, which is why she is frightened, which you have told me she always is, for the right reasons.

So if they offer it, take it. Don’t wait for sixteen because waiting looks modest, and don’t say no because you think saying no is the only thing you’re good at. You’re good at the other thing as well. I watched you on the crest. You stood in the front row as nobody at all, for two hours, in front of three thousand people, and every one of them knew exactly who you were, and you didn’t let them have it. That is the whole job. You can already do it.

I know you’ll say this has a vote in it. It does. I know you’ll say I’m doing the thing we both said we wouldn’t, which is the American heir telling the German Emperor what to think. I’m not the heir any more. I’m a King, and I’m telling my cousin what I think, on his birthday, in a letter nobody else will ever read. That’s allowed. I’ve decided it’s allowed. I’ve written it in the green book, with the date, so that if anybody ever says I thought something else, I didn’t.

14 January. Told A. to take it if they offer it. F.

There. That’s done. I still haven’t used my and then what? I’m saving it. You don’t have to answer this. If you answer it, don’t answer it straight away. I know you. You’ll walk round the room twice and then not write for a week and then write about something else, and that’s fine. I’ll know.

Don’t tell your mother I said it. I mean that. I like your mother, and she is my godmother, and she gave me a fountain pen when I was confirmed that I still use, and I think if she ever read this she would never let either of us near a pen again.

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Other things, so it isn’t only that.

Theo has a message for Lukas, page to page, because it’s too long for their one line a week. He says that he has been practising the back of the head on the bus, on his dad’s passengers, and that it works on everybody except old ladies, who turn round. He says to tell Lukas that it was Lukas who taught him, and that he said so to a reporter from the Milwaukee paper who rang his mum, and that the reporter didn’t know who Lukas was, and Theo said, “That’s the point,” and hung up, and his mum told him off for hanging up on a reporter and then made him a sandwich.

Kate says to tell you that your Schafkopf is improving on paper and that she will believe it when she sees it. I showed her your corrections to her rules. She read them and said, “He’s wrong about the Wenz,” and then she said, “No, he’s right about the Wenz,” and then she went out of the room. I have never seen Kate concede anything. I think you should frame it.

It snowed here on Thursday, properly, more than I’ve seen since I was small, and the Charter Axis was white all the way from the palace to Charter Hill, and they didn’t clear it until lunchtime. Theo and I walked the whole length of it after school, with Castellanos twenty yards behind, and nobody looked at us at all, because everybody was looking at their feet. It was the best walk I’ve ever had in this city. I thought you’d like that. Nobody can look at you when they’re trying not to fall over.

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Happy birthday, Alexander. Fifteen. I’ve been fifteen since May, and I can tell you that it’s mostly the same as fourteen, except people expect you to know where your keys are.

I hope the wreath goes well on Kingdom Day. I hope you find a clock. I hope somebody makes you a cake that isn’t too sweet, and if it’s the woman in your mother’s kitchen who makes the cocoa, I hope you eat it anyway, because she’s made it since you were four and she won’t have noticed you grow.

Yours, with every formality, and with eight months’ seniority, which I am using now, all of it, on purpose,

Frederick

P.S. I still have the five-forty from Baltimore. I had it on Thursday, in the snow. It was eleven minutes late. I thought of you anyway.