Stirling

Theo went to Leeds.

He went with Kit, on the Friday afternoon, on a train from Kemble that changed at Birmingham, with a rucksack and a bag of the school’s ginger biscuits for Mrs Barraclough and an expression of a man going behind enemy lines. Kit had invited him on the Wednesday, at supper, in the tone of somebody issuing a challenge to a duel. You can come to ours for half-term, Kit had said. You can come on the Number Four. You can see a real bus.

Is it articulated? Theo had said.

Kit had put down his fork.

So Theo went to Leeds, and Frederick went to Scotland, with his parents, and Castellanos, and Kimura, and a car that met them at Stirling station on Monday afternoon in a fine cold rain and drove up through the old town, through narrow streets of tall grey houses leaning together, up a steep cobbled hill toward a rock.

He had seen the castle from below, in September, from a wooden stand in a field with a cushion on it. He had not been inside.

It sat on the top of the rock like a crown on a head, grey and huge, with walls that went straight down into the cliff, so that it was hard to see where the building ended and the rock began, and behind it and below it on every side the land fell away to a flat green plain with a river looping through it in great bends, and beyond the plain the hills, and beyond the hills, on a clear day, Castellanos said, reading off a card, the Highlands.

It was not a clear day. It was raining. You could see the plain and the river, faintly, like a drawing on wet paper, and nothing beyond.

“There,” said his father, in the car, looking out at the plain.

“Where?”

His father pointed. Out across the flat green land below the rock, a mile or two off, there was a tall dark spike of something on a hill, and nearer, a field, green, ordinary, with a wall round it.

“Bannock,” said his father. A breath. “Burn.”

---

The castle had been the seat of the Stewart kings. Mary had been crowned in its chapel. James VI had been baptised there and brought up there and had left for London in 1603 and not come back, and for two hundred and forty years after that it had been a barracks, with soldiers in the great hall and a canteen in the palace and officers’ washing hanging in the courtyard where Mary had played as a child.

Then Ernest I had come.

He had come in the 1840s, a few years after Victoria was killed, an old man, German-formed, who believed that a King should live in his kingdoms and had been told no by almost all of them. America had a Charter and a Governor-General and a political class that would not have him. Ireland would not have him. But Scotland had no Governor-General, and no charter of its own to point to, and an empty castle in the Crown’s hands, and he had taken it. He had moved the soldiers out and a household in. He had held court in the great hall where the soldiers had eaten. He had done it without asking, a Hanoverian in the house of the Stewarts, within sight of Bannockburn, ninety-four years after his own family had broken a Scottish army at Culloden, and Scotland had not forgotten.

Frederick knew all of this. He had read it in the Register when he was twelve, in the library at Columbia Palace, and had read it again on the train north, and had felt, both times, the faint uncomfortable heat on the back of the neck that you feel reading about something a relative of yours did at a wedding.

He felt it again now, coming in under the great gate in the rain, past a sign that said, in English and Gaelic, Stirling Castle. Part of this building is a royal residence and is closed to the public.

Under it somebody had added, in marker pen, small, still.

---

His parents had the rooms in the palace block, on the south side, looking over the plain. He had a room in the King’s Old Building, which was not old, being only about five hundred years, and had a ceiling with painted beams and a window looking down a sheer drop of perhaps two hundred feet onto the roofs of the town.

The radiator worked.

He wrote it in the notebook anyway.

---

On Tuesday his father walked the Back Walk.

The Back Walk was a path round the foot of the castle rock, cut into the side of the cliff in the eighteenth century by a man who wanted to walk round the castle without being seen from it, and it went from the old town round under the walls and down through the trees to the cemetery and back, about a mile and a quarter, with a stone wall on one side and a drop on the other and a great many steps.

His father had decided to walk it on the first evening, at dinner, when Niamh, who had come up from London the day before with the luggage, had mentioned it. He had not said he would. He had put down his fork, and looked at Niamh, and lifted two fingers, and then moved them, walking, across the tablecloth.

“No,” said Niamh.

His father walked the fingers again.

“It’s a mile and a quarter. It’s steps. It’s a cliff.” Niamh folded her arms. “On the flat you’re doing four hundred yards. Five hundred on a good day. There’s forty-one steps on the Back Walk, I’ve counted them on the map, and some of them haven’t got a rail.”

His father looked at her steadily.

“Rail,” he said, and pointed, with the same finger, at Castellanos, at the end of the table.

Castellanos looked at the Duke.

“Sir,” said Castellanos. “I am not a rail.”

“Yes,” said his father.

So on Tuesday afternoon, in a gap between rains, the Duke of Cumberland, eighty-three years old and two years and a month from a raft, set off round the Back Walk below the castle where he had held court for fifty-six years, with his stick in his right hand and Castellanos at his left elbow, not touching it, and Niamh one step behind with her watch held up in front of her, and the Queen beside Niamh with a second watch, because she did not trust the first, and Frederick behind all of them, and behind Frederick, at a distance, a sergeant from the Scottish detail who had been told nothing and was clearly having the worst afternoon of his career.

It took an hour and forty minutes.

They went very slowly. On the flat parts his father walked steadily, his left foot dragging very slightly at each step, looking out over the wall at the plain and the river and the spike on the hill. On the steps he stopped at the top of each flight and looked down it the way he had looked at the train at Paddington, carefully, end to end, and then went down it one step at a time with his stick on the step below and his free hand on the wall, and on the steps that had no rail, Castellanos was the rail. He did not hold the Duke’s arm. He walked beside him with his own arm held out at the height of the Duke’s hand, an inch away, all the way down, so that if the hand wanted something it would be there, and the hand never once took it.

At the bottom, by the cemetery, his father stopped, and leaned on the stick, and breathed for a while. Then he looked up at the castle, high above, grey against the moving cloud.

“Mine,” said his father.

“Yours?”

His father shook his head. He pointed at the castle with the stick, and then at Frederick.

“Yours,” he said. And then, after a breath, and a longer breath, with something in his face that Frederick could not read, something that was nearly an apology and nearly a joke: “Sorry.”

“For what?”

His father looked up at the castle on its rock, taken without asking by a great-great-great-great-grandfather who had wanted to live in his kingdoms and been told no.

“Ask,” said his father. He tapped the stick on the ground. “Next.” A breath. “Time.”

Behind them, his mother looked at her watch.

“An hour and forty minutes,” she said. “The whole of it.”

Niamh looked at her own watch.

“An hour and thirty-nine,” said Niamh.

They looked at each other.

“Mine is right,” said the Queen of Sweden.

“With respect, ma’am,” said Niamh, “it never is.”

---

On Wednesday he went fishing on the Teith.

The Teith was a river that came down out of the hills to the north-west and joined the Forth below the castle, and it was wide and brown and fast, the colour of strong tea, with stony banks and alder trees along them and, at intervals, men standing in it up to their waists in rubber trousers, waving long rods.

The ghillie was a woman of about twenty-five called Morag.

She had been hired by the Household for the day from an estate up the valley, and had clearly been told who she was being hired for, and had clearly decided in advance that it was not going to make any difference to her whatsoever. She was tall and red-cheeked and wore an enormous waxed coat and a pair of waders and a tweed cap, and she met him on the bank at nine o’clock in the morning with two rods, a box of flies, a thermos, and an expression of cheerful, bottomless contempt.

“You’ve never cast,” she said.

“No.”

“Never at all.”

“I’ve fished. Off a boat. In the Chesapeake.”

“With a worm,” said Morag.

“With a lure.”

“Same thing,” said Morag, and gave him a rod. “Right. Here’s the thing. You don’t throw it. Everyone throws it. Everyone from the south throws it. You let the rod throw it.” She took her own rod, and stood on the bank, and lifted it, and the line went back over her shoulder in a long slow curve behind her, and hung there, impossibly, for a moment in the air, and then came forward over her head and out across the brown water, unrolling, unrolling, and the fly at the end of it touched down on the far side of the river as lightly as a leaf.

“Like that,” said Morag.

He tried.

The line went back over his shoulder and wrapped itself round the alder tree behind him three times.

Morag looked at the alder tree.

“Aye,” she said. “That’s a Sassenach cast, that.”

“What’s a Sassenach?”

“An Englishman.”

“I’m not English.”

Morag looked at him, up and down, in his waders, with his rod wrapped round a tree.

“You are to me,” she said, and went to untangle him.

---

They fished all morning. He caught nothing. He did not expect to catch anything. By eleven he could get the line out across perhaps a third of the river, in a heap, and by twelve he could get it out across half of it, nearly straight, and Morag stood beside him on the bank with her arms folded and said better in a tone that suggested it could hardly have been worse.

At twelve they sat on a rock and drank tea out of the thermos.

“You talk funny,” said Morag.

“So do you.”

“I talk right,” said Morag. “You talk like the radio. Like a man reading the news.” She drank her tea. “Can you talk any other way?”

He looked at the river for a while. The brown water going past, fast, over the stones.

Then he said, in her own voice, or as near to it as he could get, the long vowels and the rolling r and the lift at the end of the line, “Aye. That’s a Sassenach cast, that.”

Morag nearly dropped the thermos.

She looked at him. She looked at him for some time, with her mouth slightly open.

“Do it again,” she said.

He did it again.

“Christ,” said Morag. “That’s me. That’s exactly me.” She stared at him. “Where’d you learn that?”

“I didn’t learn it. I just listen.” He drank some tea. “My mother’s Swedish. I had a nanny from Cork. My father’s English. I grew up in a house with four accents in the kitchen. You pick them up.” He thought about it. “I can do Welsh. I can do Irish. I can do English, but that’s just the radio.”

“Can your friends at school do it?”

“They don’t know I can.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody’s ever asked,” said Frederick.

Morag looked at him a while longer. Then she put down the thermos, and wiped her hands on her coat, and said: “Right. Since you’ve got the ear. I’ll teach you something. You’ll need it.”

“What for?”

“You’re opening Parliament,” said Morag. “In London. Next month. It’s in the papers.” She looked out across the river. “My gran said, if that boy’s got any sense he’ll say one sentence in the Gaelic, and if he hasn’t he won’t, and we’ll know.” She looked back at him. “So.”

She taught him. It took an hour. It was one sentence, and he said it after her fifty times, sitting on a rock by the Teith with a cup of tea going cold in his hand, until she said it was right, and then twenty more times until she said it was right, and then she made him write it down, in the blue notebook, because she said he would forget, and he would not, but he wrote it down.

She did not tell him what it meant until the end.

When she did, he looked at it in the notebook for a long time.

“Is that all right?” said Morag. “To say? In the Lords?”

“I think so.”

“Will they let you?”

“They wrote the rest of it,” said Frederick. “I can have one sentence.”

---

On Thursday he went to Holyrood.

It was the seat of the Scottish Parliament, in Edinburgh, at the bottom of the Royal Mile, a low strange building of glass and stone and wood that looked, from the outside, as though somebody had tried to build a parliament out of upturned boats and leaves. He had been asked months ago. He had said yes, because his mother had said that it would be noticed if he spent a week in Stirling and did not, and that it would be noticed in the wrong way.

The First Minister met him at the door, a tall stooped man with white hair, very polite, who walked him round the building and showed him the debating chamber, which was in a horseshoe, and the windows, which were strange shapes, and the room where the committees met, and the garden, and said nothing whatsoever about the castle at Stirling, with such complete and careful courtesy that Frederick could feel it the whole time, like a draught from a door left open somewhere in the house.

At the end of it, in the hall, the First Minister shook his hand.

“Thank you for coming, sir,” he said. “It’s appreciated.”

“Thank you for having me.”

The First Minister looked at him for a moment. He seemed to be deciding something.

“Sir,” he said. “May I say one thing? Off the record.”

“Please.”

“Your father,” said the First Minister, “came here a handful of times. He was always very courteous. He was always very well briefed. He always said the right thing.” He paused. “And every time, before he left, he looked at me in exactly this hall in exactly the way you’re looking at me now, as though he was waiting for me to say something about Stirling.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I never did,” said the First Minister. “It wasn’t my place. It isn’t now.” He let go of Frederick’s hand. “But I’ll tell you what my grandmother used to say, and you can make of it what you like. She used to say, they took the castle, but they never took the hill it’s on.” He smiled, very slightly, for the first time. “I’ve never known what she meant. I think it was a compliment.”

---

On the ramparts that evening, at the top of the castle, in a high wind, with the lights of the town below and the plain beyond going dark and the spike on the hill black against the last of the sky, Kimura stood with her collar up and her hands in her pockets, looking out at Scotland with an expression of pure delight.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I am enjoying this enormously, sir.” She did not look round. “This morning you were wrapped round a tree by a woman called Morag. Yesterday your father made Sergeant Castellanos be a rail. On Tuesday your mother and his nurse had a fight about a stopwatch on a cliff. And this afternoon the First Minister of Scotland told you, as politely as I have ever heard anybody tell anybody anything, that his grandmother wants her hill back.” She took a breath of the cold wind. “I have been in the protection service for nine years. I have stood behind the King of fourteen countries at the Monument and the Abbey and on a beach in an earthquake. I have never,” she said, with deep feeling, “had a better week.”

“How many out of ten?”

Kimura thought about it, looking out at the dark plain.

“For the week, ten,” she said. “For the castle, two.” She glanced at him. “For the Gaelic, I’ll wait till I hear it.”

“How did you know about the Gaelic?”

“I was behind the alder tree, sir,” said Kimura. “All morning. Morag knew. She said I was the second-worst-hidden thing she’d ever seen on a riverbank.” She turned her collar up higher. “The first was a stag in 2019 with a crisp packet on its antler.”

---

On Sunday Theo came back from Leeds.

He came in through the door of the room at the end of the corridor in Windrush at nine o’clock at night with his rucksack and a face full of a story, and sat down on his bed, and the bed made its noise, and he said, without any preliminary at all:

“It’s a double-decker, Freddie.”

“I know.”

“No. You don’t know. You don’t know what a double-decker is until you’ve been on the top deck of one at the front going round Seacroft in the dark in the rain with Kit’s dad driving like a lunatic. It’s like flying. It’s like being on a ship. Every corner, the whole thing leans.” He lay back on the bed with his arms out. “And his dad let me sit in the cab on the last run. At the depot. Just sitting. Not driving. Just sitting in the cab.” He looked at the ceiling. “Kit’s dad is amazing.”

“Did you tell him about the Thirty-Two?”

Theo was quiet for a moment.

“I told him,” said Theo. “He said, articulated? And I said yes. And he looked at me for about a minute, and then he said, well, somebody’s got to, and gave me a biscuit.” He turned his head on the pillow. “I think it was a compliment.”

“I think it was,” said Frederick.

He took the blue notebook off the desk and opened it and looked at the sentence in Gaelic that Morag had made him write on Wednesday, on the rock, by the river. He did not read it aloud. He did not need to. He would not forget it.

He wrote under it:

They took the castle but they never took the hill it’s on. Ask next time.