26. THE LONGBOAT
Chapter twenty-six
THE LONGBOAT
PORTIA
I watch it happen from the window of the north tower, because I cannot manage the stairs quickly anymore and because I want to see it before I have to be in it.
The cars come up the long drive through a gray Baltic morning, and the first one carries the Norwegians, and the second carries the Swedes, and Suzanne is already standing on the steps in black with her hands folded and her chin up, and she has been standing there for forty minutes in the cold because she refused to wait indoors.
Marianne gets out of the first car.
She is taller than Suzanne and thinner and she moves like a woman who has spent fifty years being photographed.
Princess Marianne of Poland, who married a Norwegian shipping house in 1971 and has been Norwegian ever since, and who is Tanner's grandmother, and who I did not know existed until eight days ago.
Kerrianne gets out of the second.
Smaller. Rounder. A face made for laughing, currently not laughing.
Princess Kerrianne of Poland, who went to Sweden and stayed, and whose grandson has been getting drunk with Leon in tour buses across four continents for a decade without either of them ever once working out that they share a great-grandmother.
The three sisters look at each other across ten feet of Polish gravel.
Nobody moves.
And then Marianne says something in Polish, quite short, and Suzanne answers her, and whatever it is, Kerrianne makes a sound like a laugh with a knife in it, and then the three of them are holding onto each other in the middle of a driveway in the rain, three old women in black, and Connor stands off to the side with the umbrella and does not go to them, because he has been married to one of them for fifty years and he knows better.
Tanner finds Leon that afternoon in the hall.
I am there. I see it. Tanner, who fell into a hedge at our wedding, who has never in his life said a serious thing on purpose, stands in front of my husband holding a piece of paper his grandmother has given him, and he does not seem to know what to do with his face.
"You're my cousin," he says.
"Apparently."
"You've been my cousin for all these years."
"Apparently."
"I let you sleep on my floor in Camden. There was a mouse." Tanner's voice cracks somewhere in the middle of it. "You're a prince and I let you sleep on a floor with a mouse and my nan knew the entire time and never said a word."
"They didn't talk," Leon says. "None of them talked. That's the whole story of this family, Tanner. Nobody talked, for fifty years, and now we're all standing in a hall in Poland finding out we're related at a funeral."
And Benedict, who has come up behind them and heard all of it, says, "Well, that explains why you can't drink."
And the three of them laugh, and it goes wrong halfway through, the way laughter does at funerals, and they end up standing there gripping each other's shoulders in the middle of the hall with their heads down and not one of them able to say anything at all.
They build the boat on the beach.
That was in the will, and it was in the will in his own hand, and there is a note beside it that says do not let the Chamberlain talk you out of this, he will try. The Chamberlain tried. Suzanne looked at him.
It is not a large boat. It is the old kind, the kind the first kings of this coast went out in when this country was not a country yet, and it takes the pack and half the Norwegian delegation two days to build it properly, and Kevin works on it for eleven hours without stopping and will not tell anyone why.
They carry him down at dusk.
Keith at the front left. Leon at the front right.
Tanner and Benedict behind them, because they are family, because they have been family the whole time.
My father and Rhun walk beside because they are not permitted to carry a Polish king and would not presume, but they walk, and everyone sees them walk.
And behind, three sisters, arm in arm.
The pack is on the sand. Two hundred wolves from New York, the ones who came for a war and stayed for this. And on the dunes above, the dragons, my father's household, standing very still in the failing light.
Nobody speaks. That is what I did not expect. There is no eulogy, and there is no service, because there is a line in the will about that too. I have been spoken about enough. Put me in the water.
So they put him in the water.
Leon and Keith take the boat out to the shoulder of the surf together, father and son, up to their waists in a freezing sea, and I watch my husband, who was drowned in a sea as a child, walk into one on purpose to give a man back to it.
He does not hesitate. Not for a second. He is shaking with cold and he does not hesitate.
They let go, and the tide takes it, and it goes out easily.
Almost eagerly. And I think about eleven months of ships, grid by grid, down a coast that was not even his, at his own expense, with no name on it.
A king who searched black water for a boy for nearly a year and never once told anybody he was doing it.
The water has been looking for him too, maybe. All this time.
Kevin lights the arrow, because Kevin built the boat and no one is going to argue about it, and Kevin's hands are shaking so badly that Barbara has to steady the bow, and she does it without being asked and without saying anything, and the two of them stand there together in the wet sand and get it away.
It goes up all at once.
And on the dunes, my father lifts one hand, and the household of Dragonia sends up a column of fire beside it, straight and white and clean, the color of a healthy gate, the color of the crown from the drowned cradle. Not ember. Never ember again.
And the wolves begin to howl.
I have never heard it before. I have read about it, in books, in the careful bloodless prose of scholars, and not one of them told me what it does to a body.
Two hundred of them on a beach at dusk, and it is not howling, it is not the thing the films do.
It is a chord. It is grief given a pitch and held there, and it goes up the whole length of the beach and out over the water to a burning boat, and every hair on my body stands up, and the child under my heart kicks hard, once, as if it heard.
Leon does not howl. He is standing in the surf with his father's hand on his shoulder and he is weeping openly, and he does not howl, and nobody expects him to.
Suzanne does not weep.
She stands at the tideline in her black coat, flanked by her sisters, three princesses of a country two of them left fifty years ago, and she watches her brother burn, and her chin does not come down once.
I go and stand beside her because I cannot help it.
"He wrote to us," she says, after a long time. She is not looking at me. "In the will. There is a letter for each of us. Sealed. Thirty years too late, and he wrote them, and he had them sitting in a drawer while I lit candles in a church in Westchester." Her jaw sets. "The absolute coward."
"Are you going to read yours?"
The fire is far out now, small and steady on the darkening water, and the singing has begun to fall away in ones and twos, and the tide is turning.
"Of course I am going to read it," Suzanne says.
"I am going to read it tonight, alone, in the room I was born in, and I am going to be extremely angry with a dead man for several hours.
" She breathes in. "And then in the morning I am going to stand behind my grandson in that throne room, exactly as he asked me to, because that is the last thing my brother ever wanted from me and he knew perfectly well I would do it. "
She turns and looks at me. Her eyes are dry and her voice is perfectly steady.
"That is what he was counting on, you see.
Right to the end. He never once in his life asked for a thing he had not already worked out you would give him.
" Something almost like a smile. "It was gray, Portia.
I have thought about it for three months and the horse was gray. And I will never, ever tell him."
Dearest Readers,
Three princesses on a beach. Three countries. Fifty years of silence between them, and a brother in a burning boat who could have ended it with one letter and never did, and who wrote them all in the end anyway and left them in a drawer.
And two young men who slept on each other's floors for fifteen years, laughing, drinking, never once knowing they shared a great-grandmother.
Tell me, loves. How many people are you related to that you have never been told about? What is sitting in a drawer somewhere with your name on it?
One more page, my darlings. There is a baby coming.
Your author.