The Palace Dawn

The King had been awake since a little after five, which was not a decision. It had stopped being a decision when he was fourteen.

In the spring of that year his father had named him heir, and the Council of Aliʻi had sat for an afternoon in the Throne Room and confirmed him, and the next morning an elderly Englishman called Mr Pell, who had taught constitutional history at a university nobody in Honolulu had heard of and had come out to the islands for his chest, had been waiting for him in the library at six. Mr Pell had not explained why six. On the third morning the boy had asked, and Mr Pell had considered the question, which was one of his ways of making a boy feel he had asked a good one, and then said that a King who slept late was told things after everybody else already knew them, and that there was nothing more dangerous to a constitutional monarch than to be the last to know. The boy had thought this was a joke. Mr Pell had not made jokes. He had died in 1926 and was buried in the cemetery on Nuʻuanu Avenue under a stone that gave his university and not his age, and the King had now been getting up in the dark for twenty-three years, and had never once in all that time been told anything at six that he could not equally well have been told at nine.

He did not mind. There was a kind of privacy in it that the day did not allow.

He put on the dressing gown that hung on the back of the door, a heavy silk thing his mother had given him for his thirtieth birthday and that he had never liked and wore every morning, and went out through the sitting room to the upper veranda. The boards were cool under his feet. Nobody had yet lit the lamps along the gallery and nobody would, because he had asked years ago that they should not be lit for him, and the household had taken the instruction with the particular seriousness it gave to the small number of things he had ever asked for.

The veranda ran the whole way round the house on both floors, and at this hour he always went to the ewa side, the side that looked west across the city towards the plain and the harbour and the long arm of the island running out to Barbers Point. He did not know when he had settled on it. His father had preferred the mauka side, towards the mountains, and had stood there in the mornings with his hands behind his back looking at the Koʻolau as though he expected them to have moved in the night. The King liked to see the city. There was very little of it to see.

Honolulu at a quarter to six on a Sunday in December was a scatter of lights that did not join up. There were the lamps along King Street below the wall, and a few in the windows of the courts across the road, where somebody on the night staff of the Supreme Court was keeping a kettle going. There were the harbour lights beyond Aloha Tower, red and green, and the riding lights of a freighter at the pier. Further out, towards Kakaʻako and Kalihi, there were houses with a kitchen lit, and he could have told from the pattern which of them had a man who went fishing on a Sunday and which had a woman who went to early Mass. The rest was dark: the city asleep in its gardens, the mountains a darker dark above it, the sky not yet doing anything.

The trade wind was light and came down from the mountains behind him, cool, carrying the smell of wet earth from the valleys and something sweeter from the plumeria by the barracks. Under it, from the kitchen in the basement, came coffee. Mrs Higa would have been up since five as well. He had never asked her why.

He put his hands on the rail and stood.

---

A milk truck went along King Street with its bottles chiming and turned up Richards Street towards Beretania, and he followed the sound until it was gone. A rooster in Kakaʻako, who had been wrong about the time every morning since the summer, was wrong again. Somewhere towards the harbour a sampan’s engine coughed and caught and settled into its slow knock, and then another, and he pictured the boats going out from Kewalo in the dark with their lamps lit and the men in them talking in the Japanese of Yamaguchi and Hiroshima and Fukushima, which his secretary had once tried to teach him to tell apart and which he had never learned to. They went out every morning of the year but New Year’s Day. They would be beyond the reef by first light.

Below him, on the gravel between the palace and the barracks, the Guard was changing.

He could not see much of it from the ewa veranda: a corner of the parade, the white of the barracks walls catching the lamp at the gate, two figures crossing. He did not need to see it. He had watched it every morning of his life that he had been in Honolulu, from a nursery window and then from a schoolroom window and then from these rails, and he could have done it with his eyes shut: the sergeant’s voice, giving the orders in Hawaiian, the way the orders had been given since the Guard was raised in the old King’s time; the stamp and turn; the gate opened and closed again. Twelve men and an officer, in the white tunics that were too warm for the climate and too smart for any purpose except being looked at. The Guard was the only armed body the Kingdom had kept of its own, and it was armed with rifles that had not been fired except on the range in the whole of the King’s reign or his father’s, and it existed, as everybody including the Guard understood perfectly well, to be seen standing at the gates of ʻIolani by people walking past on King Street. The Kingdom’s defence had belonged to the Realm since 1898. That was in the Treaty. It was in the seventh article, and he could have recited it.

The officer of the morning was Captain Kealoha. He knew it by the voice, which said less than the sergeant’s and was obeyed faster. Thomas Kealoha was thirty-one, the son of a Hilo schoolmaster, and had been seconded to the King’s household as aide two years ago, which meant that he spent his days standing three paces behind the King at things, and his evenings reading books on artillery that he borrowed from the officers’ library at Schofield. He had told the King once, when asked, that he read them because he liked to know how things worked. The King, who was by profession a man who was not supposed to know how anything worked, had been obscurely touched by this.

The gate closed. The sergeant said something and somebody laughed, briefly, and was quiet.

---

Three years.

He did not often count it. He had found that the ordinary days did not want counting, and that a constitutional King who began to keep a tally of his reign had begun to think of it as an achievement, which it was not; it was a thing that happened to a man because his father had died, and it would go on happening until he died himself. But the date was there in the corner of his mind this morning like a word on the tip of the tongue, and when he found it he saw that it was not his accession at all. It was the anniversary of nothing. It was only that three years had gone by since the spring of 1938, and the third December of his reign was a week old, and he had now been King for a little over a thousand days.

A thousand ordinary days. He had liked most of them.

He had liked the mornings like this one. He had liked the routine of the boxes on weekdays, which came across from the Kuhina Nui’s office at ten and went back at four, and the signatures, and the audiences on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Wednesday afternoons when he walked across the road to the courts and sat in the public gallery for an hour, which no King of Hawaiʻi had done before him and which the Chief Justice had at first found unnerving and had since come to find, he suspected, rather a compliment. He had liked the tours of the islands, the outer islands especially, where people came out to the road to see him go by and then went back to whatever they had been doing, as though the King were weather. He had liked the Nobles, most of them, and the House, some of them, and the long arguments over the land that never ended because they were not supposed to end. He had liked being left alone by the Realm.

The Realm left him alone very thoroughly.

It had been doing so for forty-three years, and in all that time, as far as he could make out from the papers in his father’s library, nobody in New Westminster had thought about the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi for longer than it took to read a cable about it, except on the two or three occasions when it had wanted something and found that the Treaty said it could not have it. The Realm’s Resident Commissioner came to tea once a month and was charming about the weather. The Realm’s admirals came to dinner when the fleet was in and were charming about the Queen. The Realm’s newspapers, which arrived by sea a week late, mentioned the Kingdom when there was a volcano. It did not trouble him. His father had said that the Realm’s inattention was the most valuable thing the Kingdom owned, after the land, and that it should be guarded in the same way, by never giving anybody a reason to look.

It was a thing he had thought about more this year than in any year before. The fleet had always come and gone at Puʻuloa; it had been coming and going since before he was born. But in the last year and a half the comings had grown longer and the goings shorter, until the battleships seemed to belong to the anchorage the way the cane belonged to the plain, and the Realm, which had not looked at the Kingdom for forty years, had begun to look at it a great deal. There were more officers at dinner. There were more sailors on Hotel Street. There were men from the Realm’s army surveying things on the windward side that had not needed surveying before, and a lease for an airfield on Kauaʻi that the Kuhina Nui had spent the summer reading line by line. None of it was anything. All of it was the Treaty doing what the Treaty had been written to do. Hawaiian land was available for the Realm’s defence; it said so in the seventh article. He had signed the leases. He would sign more.

He looked west, where the plain ran out under the dark towards Puʻuloa. He could not see the anchorage from here. Nobody in the city could. It was six miles off, behind Kalihi and the low ground beyond it and the long fields of cane, and in the daytime all you saw of it from the palace was nothing, a flat line, and on a still evening sometimes the smoke from the yards. But he knew it was there in the dark, the way he knew the mountains were there behind him. The fleet had come in on Friday, the battleships in a long grey line past the harbour mouth in the afternoon while half the city stood on the sea wall to watch, and it would be at its moorings this morning with its men asleep or ashore, and on Saturday night Hotel Street had been, the Chamberlain reported, very full.

---

He went back in to look at the Queen.

She was asleep, as she always was at this hour, on her side with one arm over her head, as though she had been about to wave to somebody when sleep took her. The window behind her was a grey square now instead of a black one. He did not go in. He had done it once, early in their marriage, and she had woken, and told him with great gentleness and absolute clarity that if he ever did it again she would have the door bricked up, and he had believed her, and had stood in the doorway every morning since for eleven years with a sense of looking at something he had been specially let off from guarding.

Leinani was thirty-three. She was the daughter of a chiefly family on Kauaʻi that had more genealogy than money and more opinions than either, and she had married him at twenty-two with the air of a woman taking on a difficult but interesting piece of land. She rode, and swam off the beach at Waikīkī in the early morning when he would let her, and read novels in three languages, and had no patience at all with the parts of being a Queen that consisted of being looked at. She was the only person in the Kingdom who called him by his name.

He stood a little longer than usual, and then went back along the corridor, and on the way he passed the door at the end that was kept shut.

He did not stop. He never stopped. He passed it every morning, and every morning he was aware of it in the way a man is aware of a step in the dark that he knows is there, and his foot found the place and went over it, and he was past.

---

Kaʻai came up at a quarter past six with the coffee, as he had come up at a quarter past six for the King’s father, and set the tray on the table on the veranda without a word, and waited.

The Chamberlain was seventy. He had come into the household as a boy of fifteen in Kalākaua’s time, when the palace was new, and had been footman and under-butler and steward and at last Chamberlain, and he had a way of standing that suggested he had been carved for the purpose. He was a small, very upright man with white hair cut short and a face that did not move except when he was alone with the King, when it moved about one degree.

“Nothing in the night, sir,” he said.

“Nothing at all?”

“A cable from the Resident Commissioner’s office, sir, which is closed until Monday, to say that it is closed until Monday.”

“That’s very thorough of them.”

“Sir Arthur is a thorough man,” said Kaʻai, and the face moved its degree.

The King poured his own coffee, which was one of his small number of rules, and drank it standing at the rail. It was Kona coffee, from a farm on the slopes above Kealakekua that had been sending the palace a sack a month since his grandfather’s time and had never once sent an invoice. Every year the Chamberlain wrote to ask for one, and every year the farm wrote back a letter of great courtesy that did not mention money. Every year the King signed a Christmas card to the family with his own hand. It was, he thought, one of the better arrangements in the Kingdom, and quite possibly unconstitutional.

“The eight o’clock at St Andrew’s,” Kaʻai said, “and lunch at one, and nothing this afternoon. The Queen has asked for the car at four to go out to Kahala to see her aunt.”

“Is the aunt ill?”

“The aunt is ninety-one, sir. The Queen says she is always ill and never dies.”

“Then the Queen should go.”

“Yes, sir.”

That was the day. It was not a full one. It was a Sunday, and on Sundays the King of Hawaiʻi did almost nothing, which he had been brought up to regard as the proper condition of a constitutional sovereign on every other day of the week as well. He went to one cathedral or the other in the morning, the Anglican on the first and third Sundays of the month and the Catholic on the second and fourth, an arrangement his father had invented in 1900 and that had been in its way the most consequential constitutional act of his reign. He had lunch with the Queen. He read. In the evening, if the weather held, they walked in the grounds after dark, when there was nobody at the railings to see them.

“Mr Takemoto rang last night,” Kaʻai said, “to say he would come in early with the week’s papers. He wondered whether you would want them before church.”

“He should have the day off.”

“I said so, sir. He said he would come in early.”

“Then he will come in early.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kaʻai went away. The King drank the rest of his coffee and stood with the cup in his hand.

---

The sky had begun.

It began, as it always did at this season, behind Diamond Head, which was the wrong place from here, so that the first of the light came at the palace from the left and over the shoulder, and the city in front of him went from black to grey before it had any colour at all. He watched the grey come up out of the streets. He watched the roofs of Kakaʻako find their edges, and the stacks of the cannery, and the tower at the harbour, and the long flat line beyond it where nothing could be seen. Punchbowl stood up behind him on the right, the crater rim with its old guns that had not fired since the old King’s birthday salutes. The mountains behind it came forward out of the dark one ridge at a time, each one a little greener than the one before, as though somebody were laying them down on the table.

The courts across the road came out of the dark with the rest, and the statue in front of them.

He looked at it, as he did most mornings. It was the first Kamehameha, in gilt, with his spear and his cloak and his arm held out, and he stood facing the palace across King Street, so that every morning of his life the King of Hawaiʻi had come out onto this veranda and found the founder of his house already there, looking at him with his hand out, as though there were something he had been meaning to say about the place and was waiting for the right moment. The statue had been made in Europe and had gone down with its ship off the Falklands on the way out, and been salvaged, and had arrived years late and after a copy, and the Kingdom had put the copy here and the original in the north of the Big Island, where the first Kamehameha was born. The King had always liked that. It seemed to him to tell you most of what you needed to know about Hawaiʻi: that it had been sent the wrong thing and kept it, and had been sent the right thing later and put it where it belonged.

In the street below, a bus went by towards Waikīkī with its lights still on and three people in it, and he watched it out of sight.

The city was waking. He could hear it now: doors, a dog, a woman calling a child in Portuguese, a radio somewhere playing a hymn too early. On weekdays by now King Street would have been full of people going to work, in on the streetcars from Kaimukī and Kalihi and the valleys, on bicycles, on foot along the sea wall, and every year there were more of them in cars, and every year the cars came in from further out, as though the city were a pond and the ring of people living around it were being pushed further back from the edge by some force nobody could see. He had remarked on it once to the Kuhina Nui, who had said that it was called rent. He had remarked on it once to the Queen, who had said that it was called the Navy. On Sundays the ring stayed at home, and Honolulu was a small town again for a day, and he liked it best like this.

A King, his father had told him, should never go anywhere he did not have to, because a King who travels is a King who is somewhere else. It had seemed to him at fourteen the saddest sentence he had ever heard. At thirty-seven he understood it to be a kind of instruction, and possibly a kindness. He went where the Kingdom needed him to go. He went to the outer islands four times a year and to the courts on Wednesdays and to one cathedral or the other on Sundays, and to the Realm not at all, not once in three years, because nobody in the Realm had ever asked. The rest of the time he was here. It was the whole of his work, being here. He had never thought it a small thing, though he had sometimes thought it a lonely one.

Down on the parade the Guard had fallen out, all but the two at the gate. Captain Kealoha was walking back across the gravel towards the barracks with his cap under his arm, unhurried, the way a man walks on a Sunday when the day has nothing in it, and halfway across he looked up at the veranda, as he did every morning, and saw the King there, and stopped, and saluted.

The King lifted his cup to him. It was their arrangement. Neither of them had ever mentioned it.

Then Kealoha went in, and the King stood at the rail with the empty cup and watched the light come on along the plain to the west, over the cane and the low ground, towards the place where the anchorage was and could not be seen. It was going to be a fine day. There was a little cloud over the Waiʻanae range and none anywhere else, and the wind was light, and the sea beyond the harbour was the colour it went for an hour after dawn and never again all day, a grey with blue under it, like the inside of a shell.

He thought, with the small private pleasure of a man who has nothing to do, that it would be an ordinary day.

He went in to dress.