I am an old man now, much older than he was then. I’ve seen stuff, a lot of stuff, and I’ve done stuff too, and almost all of it—especially the stuff I’ve done—has made me think a bit less harshly about other people and the stuff they do. I can understand why a man would steal. It might be desperation; it might be greed; it might be the heat of the moment. I don’t know, but I can understand it. I stole a camel and a strongbox once. And I can understand why a man would go with women. It might be desperation; it might be greed; it might be the heat of the moment. Women are pretty nice and, as you know, I’ve been with a few. But I’ve never been able to understand what the Professor did. I couldn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. If ever I had had a daughter, my little Aferdita, then nothing would have parted her from me. I would have cared for her and protected her no matter what. No fear could have driven me away from her; no amount of money could have tempted me to give her up. I would have loved her with a fierce love, and I know this because I have loved her fiercely all these years although she was never born. How much more would I have loved her if I had once held her in my arms, if I had kissed her, if I had smelled her?

But the Professor chose to flee from Sarah and I can’t understand why. On the train, when we had our heart to heart, he was ready to face death with Sarah rather than let her face it alone, but when push came to shove maybe his courage failed him. Maybe he was afraid of what might happen to her, not of what might happen to him. Maybe that was what he couldn’t face. Or maybe the thought of a little bit of cash was worth more to him than she was. “Get the money ready.” That’s what he said. Such a tiny little bit of money.

I could hardly bear to look at him. None of us could. He was suddenly embarrassing, as if we had noticed for the first time that he was a cripple.

You don’t need eyes to know when you are being watched, and he must have felt us turning our gaze away from him. “I must prepare,” he said. “I will wait in my room until it’s time to leave for the ceremony.”

Arbuthnot opened the door as he approached and the Professor paused on the threshold, swinging his cane to tap it against the doorposts, and went out into the corridor.

When he was gone, Arbuthnot said, “Is it too early for a brandy?”

“It’s never too early for a brandy,” Max said, and he took the last, half-empty bottle out of the cabinet by my bed.

I didn’t say anything. I just drank.

We didn’t hang about over the brandy. There are two kinds of drink: the kind you want and the kind you need. This was the second kind, and you don’t hang about with those. I had a bad taste in my mouth and I wanted the brandy to take it away. Anyway, we all had things to do, boots to polish, brass to burnish, horses to brush, epaulets to buff and magnificent whiskers to curl—all except me, of course.

I had nothing to do but to read, over and over, the two sheets of paper which Kemali had written out for me to guide me through the ceremonial of the coronation. There is no prompter’s box at a coronation, no matter how incompetent the actors, but the more I tried to learn my lines, the less they stuck in my head. Orders of precedence, who stood where, who moved, who kept still, where they moved to, who said what, when the music played, where to go in the processions … none of it made any sense and it wasn’t fair. Those flaming Albanoks had been practicing for months, learning their dance steps off by heart, but it was all new to me and, quite frankly, I couldn’t keep up so I decided not to bother.

The little china clock on the mantelpiece was striking the half-hour when Arbuthnot knocked at my door and came in.

“They found you a new fez,” he said. “We can’t have you riding through town bareheaded like a beggar.”

I must say it was much nicer than the one Sarah had knocked up for me on board the yacht, with a fancy sparkler stuck on the front which must have been several times more valuable than the one I was wearing on my chest.

I put it on, slowly, two-handed, just the way I’d put on the crown of Skanderbeg, squaring it up across my brow, and I must admit I was thinking of the time I would take it off again, the time I would stand to wear my crown.

I drew myself up to my full height and I gave my jacket a bit of a tug. “How do I look?”

“Very smart, old boy. I think we’re ready for the off.”

I walked out the door, pulling my gloves on so they were tight and smooth, just as they should be, and Arbuthnot came on a pace or two behind, spurs a-jingle, tall and rangy, with the look of a man who knew his business. That uniform of his had seen better days, but stretched over his broad shoulders, with his epaulets gleaming, by God, he looked the part.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, as if he could tell from my back that I might waver a little, as if he could sense that I was making a little extra effort to be brave and firm and upright, like a man on his way to have his head taken off instead of having a crown put on.

The whole house was silent, not a Sunday-afternoon silent, not even a middle-of-the-night silent, but a stoppedclock silent, the kind of silence you get in the circus when the kid on the high wire starts to fall, the silence that comes in the moment after everyone breathes in and before the moment that they start to scream. It was a moment like that, and when we got to the top of the stairs, Arbuthnot and me—no, when I got to the top of the stairs—the moment burst.

The hall of my palazzo was jammed with people: soldiers more or less in uniform, bashi-bazouks and fathers-in-law with their troops of mustachioed brigands crowded round the door. Every step of the grand staircase had a lancer standing on it as an honor guard, every one of them with a brass helmet, polished thin and gleaming like the sun, and horsehair plumes hanging down his neck and black shiny boots up over his knees, and every one of them holding a pig-sticker that scraped my ceiling or threatened my lovely chandelier. There were packs of kids jammed between the lancers’ feet, with more of them at the bottom of the stairs—little girls in dresses holding baskets of flowers and, in amongst them, the palazzo staff, maids in mob caps looking pink and prim and starched and well worth a try and the cook and his boy and God alone knows all who else, people I’d never seen before, butlers and under-butlers and grooms and boots and footmen, I can’t begin to guess who or how many, and there, at the foot of the stairs was my Sarah, so small, so lovely, in a hat that would knock your eye out and a long lilac dress that fitted her the way the petals fit a rose before it opens. God knows where she found it—maybe on some foraging expedition through the wardrobes of the palazzo—but she looked magnificent, and Tifty was there and Mrs. MacLeod and even the girls of the harem, all done up to the nines. I saw Sarah and only Sarah. She raised her eyes to the top of the stairs and looked up at me from under the brim of that fabulous hat and I saw her and she saw me, not a man playing at dressing up but me, Otto, a man who was striving to be all that a king should be, for her sake and then, like I said, the moment burst. The whole place went crazy with cheering and shouting, mad clapping and a lot of shouted “Mbrets,” which I took to be kind sentiments regarding my longevity. They wanted this to work. They wished me well. They believed in me and they wanted it to be true just as much as I did.

I came down the stairs between my rows of lancers as they struggled not to watch me pass and stand, eyes front, looking grim-faced, and there was Sarah, clapping madder than all the rest, with Tifty beside her, arm in arm with Max, and both of them clapping and Tifty jiggling deliciously as she clapped, and Mrs. MacLeod and the harem girls and the Professor too, because he meant it, however much he begrudged it, or because he lacked the courage to defy a mob, even a mob as genteel as this one.

It fell on me like a sudden shower of rain. I was standing, drenched in a torrent, a cataract of applause, but it was more than that. It was pride. It was hope. It was love.