Freddy and Fredericka Read online

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  I. THE GARDEN of EDEN

  THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, WHO WOULD RATHER NOT

  . . . AND THE WOMAN WHO PREFERRED THAT HE WOULD

  THE LORD CECIL PSNAKE AND THE LORD ALFIE DIDGERIDOO

  CRISIS OF THE ROYALS: THE PRIME MINISTER V MR APEHAND, LEADER OF HM LOYAL OPPOSITION

  PARLEY AT WINDSOR

  II. PARADISE LOST

  ANGELS

  GYPSIES

  THIEVES

  TRAMPS

  III. MANIFEST DESTINY

  ANGLO-SAXON TIMES IN CHICAGO

  A SHORT INTERLUDE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

  “THE ALUMINUM-TONGUED ORATOR OF THE PLATTE”

  FLASH FIRE

  IV. PARADISE REGAINED

  FREDDY ESCAPES FROM THE MENTAL HOSPITAL AND ENTERS AMERICAN POLITICS. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

  MOOCOCK AT FRESH SIGHT

  PHILIPPA

  CRAIG-VYVYAN AND CORONATION

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Freddy and Fredericka

  A Penguin Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by Mark Helprin

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0117-6

  A PENGUIN BOOK®

  Penguin Books first published by The Penguin Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  PENGUIN and the “P” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: May, 2006

  ALSO BY MARK HELPRIN

  The Pacific and Other Stories

  Memoir from Antproof Case

  A Soldier of the Great War

  Winter’s Tale

  Ellis Island and Other Stories

  Refiner’s Fire

  A Dove of the East and Other Stories

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Veil of Snows

  A City in Winter

  Swan Lake

  For E.L.H., too late

  Misconstruction is the emblem of a lost age.

  * * *

  As penance for departure from the royal ideal and instruction therein, Frederick and Fredericka, the Prince and Princess of Wales, are forced to travel through America penniless and incognito, with the object of reacquiring the deviant former colonies for the British Crown.

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  THOUGH IT IS HARD to be a king, it is harder yet to become one. This is especially true if among those who are to be your subjects and in international opinion it is generally accepted that you are not quite in your right mind, and are some sort of bloody idiot who repeatedly does stunning, inexplicable things that embarrass your wife, your family, and the nation—but not you, because you believe, and state, that you are impeccably sane, and you cannot understand what all the fuss is about.

  You refuse embarrassment because you hold that kings and those who would be kings must struggle to find and define their duty and their special place in the world, and are meant to live on the edge. Why do people expect kings to be unlike anyone else, and then punish them for it? Why is a king, who by accident of birth must submit to the will and expectation of scores of millions, or even (as in the case of the British, world-apparent monarchy) thousands of millions, savagely held to account as he forges a tormented youth into what must appear on Coronation Day to be a royal being of evident perfection?

  Like a Roman gladiator alternately reviled by or beloved of the crowd, prior to his ascension to the throne the future king lives a life of overwrought luxury, dreadful isolation, and constant challenge. He desires above all to be an ordinary man, if only because a king is kept from the world as ordinary men are not, and the world is an inestimably better and richer prize than any throne. And yet he will fight savagely to achieve his destiny, not because it is attractive to him but because his sense of honour will not let him desert the field. How strange.

  But that is theory, and this is the story not only of the royal state but of two people, Freddy and Fredericka, who had to come to terms both with it and with each other. After so many articles in the press and years of frothy gossip, you may think you know them, but you don’t.

  My account of what befell them is as unvarnished and pure as a tree on an ocean promontory that has been stripped of its leaves in storm, or a sheep that has been shorn to the pink. It is brutally, literally, and mortifyingly true. This is not because I hold no brief for these two dear friends but because I was asked—commanded—to present their story without argument, polemic, defence, or excuse. For the most part it is a story that I know only as it was told to me. How do I know then, and how can I assure others, that it is accurate?

  I know because I was present at the many hypnosis sessions at Sandringham, during which I was absolutely sure that the king was not pretending, for as brilliant and versatile as he may be, he does not have other than in the hypnotic state the ability to read, memorise, and recite backward the Karachi Yellow Pages at high speed, all the while simulating with intense bodily jerkings the paroxysmal death struggle of a salt-water game fish. I know because I used every means to verify all that was related to me, and I know because I have it on the word of someone who has suffered mightily for the sake of such things as keeping his word. But I know most of all because it was told to me, bereft of embellishment, as a duty of the heart and in memory of one who is gone.

  I do admit to having taken some liberties of narration. How else could I convey the scope both of their adventures and their transformation? But you cannot trust me, you must trust only the story. I myself am but a cipher to their great account, and what follows is not mine but theirs. And, when you enter, you will be not with me, but with them most certainly. Imagine, therefore, that within these paper portals is an ancient monarchy brought to a parlous state, and a warlike and restless prince lost in a time that for its lack of passion, modesty, and truth was inappropriate to him and broke his heart again and again, but could never break it all the way.

  GEOFFREY, LORD PIGGLESWADE

  Gower Lodge, Mortlake

  I.

  THE GARDEN

  of EDEN

  THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, WHO WOULD RATHER NOT

  THE WIND WAS LUFFING over the tablelands of Skye as a storm built up at sea, but its slow passage promised hours more of sunshine and that the lakes would stay blue. Toward the end of a morning that for September was quite warm, a boy of Kilmuir was cutting across the open land on his way to Staffin. The way was long, with neither road nor path, but the more empty the places in which he travelled and the more space to separate him from all else, the more, in his eyes, he achieved.

  At the northern tip of the Isle of Skye are mountains resting in a skirl of cloud risen from the firth. Here, storms are seen from far off and cannot surprise. They mount in black even as the sun shines upon the oceans of purple heather over which they will sweep. Some
times, if the west wind is slow, the storms stay still and their bright thunderbolts flash like neon lights against unmoving walls of dark cloud.

  One such storm had risen at sea and was at the back of the boy from Kilmuir. Like the farmer who fills the bin of his combine with a golden stream of grain, he had a sense of adding to his riches, not with every second that passed but with every step he took that carried him away from the settled world. He was fourteen and did not tire: his strength only grew as he crossed the flatland and climbed to the plateaux. Though the storm behind him billowed higher and higher, he was confident that were he not to slacken but rather to build strength upon strength and speed upon speed, he could outrun it. What a triumph not to have taken the road but to have crossed the landscape with no engine save his own heart.

  With rhythmic ease, he ascended a wide apron of broken rock to what seemed the highest and most deserted plain in all of Scotland. For a moment, with his senses attuned to wind and sky, everything was perfect. But then perfection broke, when he saw, as if in a magazine advertisement come to life, a green Land Rover parked on a rise and facing west. Unlike most military Land Rovers, it gleamed. It had impressed into the grass a track that would take a year to heal. If twenty or thirty like it were set loose upon even so wide a place as this, they would crisscross it with thread-like cuts, collapse burrows, and crush nests.

  Abandoning a line of travel that he had bent only to skirt lakes, he turned toward the offending object. Surely whoever had broken the spell of these Highlands was inauthentic, someone who did not and could not belong, who was soft and pale and would shrink before this young Scot who would shame him into going back to London or New York. Thus a victory of the wild over the settled, farms over industry, the pure over the polluted, the gold over the dross, the wheat the chaff, and so on, although it was true that he himself wanted quite badly to go to London.

  As he closed on the Land Rover he saw through its windows someone who was standing on the other side and very colourfully dressed. Were it a girl, confrontation might be inappropriate, especially were she pretty. She would probably be a London girl, beautiful and elegant, with expensive clothing and a Florentine scarf draped over her shoulders like the petals of a crocus, though he had neither seen such a thing nor heard the words for it. He understood, however, that the appearance of a girl like this might be possible and that something was out of the ordinary, for he saw painted on the passenger door behind the driver’s position one of the involved little crests that grace many things, from postboxes to bottles of cologne, over two familiar letters: PR. This signified Queen Philippa. He didn’t know why she might be called Philippa R. Had he known that the royal family’s last name (taken upon the abandonment of their German dynastic name during the Great War) was Finney, according to his lights her initials would have been PF.

  From the shine of the car and the painted crest he thought that it might belong to a travel company of the type that takes people to places where they think they cannot walk but where, when they do, they walk all day through torrents of clouds and sky. Swinging around the back of the spotless vehicle, he saw who had brought it there. It was neither a girl from New York nor a girl at all, nor even an Englishman, but a massive, white-haired, kilted Highlander, with a face that had been shaped by many battles. On his wrist was a falcon the size of an eagle, which, to register the intrusion, lifted its still-folded wings and cupped the air.

  Unwilling to be dumbstruck, the boy of Kilmuir held his ground, saying in the pure accent of Skye, “I thought you were a girl.”

  “Whom are you addressing?” the falconer asked, imperturbed.

  “You. I thought you were a girl.”

  “Did you.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Why?” asked Bannerman, the falconer, narrowing his eyes, but in a kindly way he had for adolescents.

  “Why?” came the echo, as if the boy were just as curious, and had put the question to himself as if he had not known the answer.

  “Why did you think I was a girl? Do I look like a girl? Have you never seen a girl?”

  “It’s a touring company car,” the boy said, as if that explained anything.

  “No it isn’t,” Bannerman replied, turning away to stare into the immense sunlit space and at the storm that hovered over the sea and isles to the west.

  The boy followed beside him. “It isn’t?”

  “No.”

  “What is it, then, a Royal Mail car?”

  “Does it look like a Royal Mail car?”

  “What’s the thing on the door, that they’ve got on marmalade jars?”

  “The thing on the door is the queen’s coat of arms.”

  “Queen Philippa?”

  “Aye.”

  “What’s it doing on your car?”

  “It isn’t my car.”

  “Whose car is it?”

  “Whose car,” the falconer asked, pregnantly, “do you think it is?”

  “Queen Philippa’s?” the boy replied.

  “That’s it.”

  “I don’t believe you.” But he did believe him, because, among other things, there was more inlaid wood and fine leather inside this military vehicle than in a Rolls-Royce. Nonetheless, he kept up his line. “What would the queen’s car be doing here?”

  “I drove it here.”

  “What for?”

  “Will you please stop asking questions?”

  “What do you mean, ‘stop asking questions’?”

  “You ask question after question.”

  “Why?” asked the boy.

  “I don’t know. How should I know? You should get on your way. If it rains, as it will, I will nay let you in the car.”

  “I don’t care if you let me in or not. The rain doesn’t bother me.”

  “All right,” Bannerman said, noting that the boy’s threadbare waxed jacket and bedraggled boots would keep no water out, “just give me some distance, if you will.”

  When the boy was hurt, he was stubborn. “Nah, I won’t,” he said, voice breaking but still nonchalant.

  “To hell with you, then.”

  “To hell with you,” came the echo.

  “Aren’t you going to go?” Bannerman asked. “After you tell someone to go to hell, you walk away.” When the boy didn’t move, he asked, “Don’t you?”

  “Not me. And why’d you make those tracks with the queen’s car? This isn’t England, you know, where the grass grows easily; it’s Scotland, where it takes a year.”

  “I know it’s Scotland. I’m here for a reason that’s worth some tracks in the heather.”

  “What reason?”

  “If I tell you will you promise to go?”

  “I’m not gonna. I’ll hang about. What are you doing with the queen’s car, anyway? It’s her bird, too. It’s got the marmalade thing on its leathers.”

  “Aye, it’s got the marmalade thing on its jesses, and it is the queen’s.”

  “What is it, a chicken?” the boy asked, as part of his war against the falconer.

  “A chicken!”

  The falcon, who seemed to understand English, flexed his talons.

  “This is no chicken,” Bannerman said with unshaken pride. “This is Her Majesty’s falcon Craig-Vyvyan, the son of Finlaec, the son of Gueldres, the son of Habicht, the son of Duff, the son of Grimnock the greatest falcon of them all. He’s a tiercel; that is, a male, a boy. Ordinarily, you don’t call tiercels falcons: they’re not big enough. But Craig-Vyvyan here, male or not, is the biggest falcon in England. Scotland, too. Britain. Maybe the world.”

  The boy was stunned, and stood perfectly still, his mouth ajar as if in dementia.

  “I thought you’d be impressed,” said Bannerman.

  “I don’t care about falcons,” the boy said, “not at all. Couldn’t care less about falcons.”

  “I see,” said Bannerman, doubting him.

  “What did you say his name was, again?”

  “Craig-Vyvyan, the son of Finlaec, the s
on of Gueldres, the son of Habicht, the son of Duff, the son of Grimnock the greatest falcon of them all.”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Grimnock the greatest falcon of them all?”

  “No, Craig-Vyvyan. That’s me, Craig-Vyvyan. I’ve got the same name.”

  “With a hyphen?” Bannerman asked.

  “What’s a hyphen?”

  Bannerman made a hyphen in the air with his right index finger.

  “Aye, a hyphen.”

  “And the Vyvyan spelled with two Y’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Cockaleekie.”

  “Cockaleekie. Did you ever think of changing it?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Just a thought. But your first name is Craig-Vyvyan?”

  “I told ya.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  “My grandma’s brother was Craig, and Vyvyan was my father’s friend, who was with him in Normandy in Lord Lovat’s Number Four Commando, and died in my father’s arms. My father cannot say the name without tears coming to his eyes, so he calls me by the first part, and when he calls me by my whole name, well, he cries.”

  “Your father must be my age, then.”

  “He is. My ma is his second wife.”

  “Well, Craig-Vyvyan, stay a while.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Now you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t like having the same name as the bird. It’s kinda spooky. I think I’ll just be gone. I’m on my way to see my uncle in Staffin. He’s my mother’s brother, and he’s just had an operation on the bones of his foot. I’ll go see him now. Good-bye.”

  “Wait,” said the queen’s falconer. “You mustn’t go. You’re part of history now, even if you don’t know it.”

  “And how is that?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you just yet, although to keep you here I will, if I must, and if you promise not to talk to the newspapers.”