The Card

The card came up on his breakfast tray at a quarter past six on Wednesday, on a small silver salver, which was how he knew it was going to be bad.

Bridget did not use the salver. Nobody used the salver for anything that came to Frederick, except things that had been sent up by the Household’s offices on the ground floor, which came with a footman, which this did: Dacre, with his very large hands, holding the salver out in front of him at the kitchen door as though it had something alive on it.

“From Mr Pargeter’s office, sir,” said Dacre. “For the second. For your approval.”

Bridget, at the range, did not turn round. She said, to the frying pan, “I told her,” in a tone of deep and righteous gloom, and banged it.

Frederick took the card off the salver.

It was beautiful. That was the worst of it. It was a thick, stiff, white card, as thick as a playing card and twice as heavy, with a bevelled edge that had been gilded, so that it caught the light from the kitchen window in a thin gold line all the way round; and at the top, in the centre, embossed so that he could feel it with his thumb, in dark blue, was the crest: his own, the Prince of Columbia’s, the arms of the Royal Standard with the white label of three points across the top of them. Under the crest the words were engraved, in a copperplate so fine and so even that it looked as though it had grown there:

His Royal Highness the Prince of Columbia

requests the pleasure of the company of

and then a gap, a long ruled line, on which somebody in the stationery office had written, in a different copperplate, by hand, in black ink, with enormous care:

Master Theodore Hartigan

and under it, engraved again:

at Columbia Palace on Sunday, the 2nd of November, 2025 at two o’clock

Informal

R.S.V.P. The Master of the Household Columbia Palace, New Westminster

He read it twice. Then he turned it over. The back was blank, white, and very slightly textured, like linen.

“Informal,” said Frederick.

“That’s to say you don’t have to wear a sword,” said Bridget, to the frying pan.

---

He took it up to Dame M at a quarter to seven.

He had never gone to her office in the morning. She was there, though; she was always there, it turned out, at a quarter to seven, at the desk with the lamp, with the day; and she looked up when he knocked and came in with the card in his hand, and looked at the card, and stood up.

“Sir.”

“I can’t send this,” said Frederick.

He put it on her desk. It lay there in the lamplight with its gold edge shining. Dame M looked down at it for a moment without touching it.

“It is the Household’s invitation card, sir,” she said. “The standard one. For an occasion at the Palace at which the Prince is the host. It has been the same since 1952.” She paused. “Mr Pargeter ordered it from the stationery office yesterday afternoon, after the Queen’s ruling. He did it because it is what the Household does when there is an occasion and a guest. He did not think about it any further than that. Which is, in fairness to Mr Pargeter, how the Household has always worked, and mostly it works very well.”

“I’d send this to an ambassador,” said Frederick.

“You have, sir. Several. At Christmas when you were eight there was a tea for the children of the diplomatic corps.”

He did not remember it. He remembered, vaguely, a room full of small children in clothes that were too good for them, and a magician who had been very nervous, and a girl from one of the embassies who had cried because the magician had made her handkerchief disappear and had not been able to make it come back.

“I can’t send it to Theo,” he said.

Dame M looked at him.

“Why not, sir?”

He thought about it properly, because she had asked properly.

“Because he’d have to show it to his mum,” he said. “And his dad. He hasn’t told them. About anything. About me. And when he does, this would be the first thing they’d see.” He looked at the card, at the gold edge, and the crest he could feel with his thumb, and requests the pleasure. “It would be like a letter from the government. They’d think he was in trouble.”

Dame M did not say anything for some time.

Then she picked up the card, by its edges, the way you would pick up a photograph, and looked at it, and put it down again.

“What would you send, sir?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “I’ve never sent one.”

“Then I suggest,” said Dame M, “that you find out.” She looked at the clock on her wall, which said ten to seven. “You have twenty-five minutes before Sergeant Castellanos is at the door. There are plain cards in the drawer of the desk in your room, I believe, sir. And a pen.” She paused. “The Household will not be offended. The Household will, if anything, be relieved. It has never known how to invite a friend. It only knows how to invite a guest.”

---

There were plain cards in the drawer of the desk in his room.

There were a great many things in the drawer of the desk in his room that he had never used, because they had been put there by somebody in case he needed them, the way Bridget put pens in his bag: writing paper with the crest and writing paper without, envelopes in four sizes, a box of paper clips, a stapler, a bottle of ink, three pencils of different hardnesses, a ruler, a rubber in the shape of a train that his cousin Charlotte had sent him from Berlin when he was eight, and a packet of plain white cards, unlined, a little smaller than a postcard, with nothing on them at all.

He took one out. He took out the fountain pen his father had given him on his tenth birthday, which was black, and heavy, and had his father’s cipher on the clip, and which he used for writing to his father and for nothing else.

He sat down at the desk.

He did not know how to start. He had written a great many letters in his life. He had written thank-you letters since he was five, to ambassadors and Prime Ministers and Governors and the heads of regiments and charities and orders, for presents he had been sent on his birthday, in a hand that had been taught him by a lady called Mrs Forsythe who had come to the Palace twice a week when he was six and made him do the loops on a page of ruled lines until they were all exactly the same height. He knew how to write Dear Prime Minister and Your Excellency and Dear Admiral. He knew how to end a letter to the Primate and how to end a letter to the Governor of California and how to end a letter to his great-aunt in Hanover, who was ninety-one and did not like to be reminded. He had never in his life written a letter to somebody who was his own age and not his cousin.

He wrote:

Dear Theodore,

He looked at it.

It was wrong. It was very obviously wrong. Nobody called him Theodore. The stationery office had called him Theodore, on the ruled line, in copperplate, because Theodore was his name on the form; and Mrs Okonjo on the second floor might, he thought, call him Theodore, because she sounded like a person who would; but nobody who sat next to him in mathematics did. Frederick crossed it out. That spoilt the card. He got another one.

Dear Theo,

That was better. He looked at it for some time. Then he wrote, under it, carefully, in Mrs Forsythe’s loops, all the same height:

I should be very pleased if you would come to my half-birthday, which is on Sunday the 2nd of November, at two o’clock, at Columbia Palace.

He looked at that.

It was wrong too. It was not as wrong as Theodore, but it was wrong. It was the way he would write to an ambassador’s son. I should be very pleased if you would come. It was what the engraved card said, in fewer words, and with I instead of His Royal Highness, but it was the same thing; it was a request for the pleasure of the company. He could hear it. He could hear Theo reading it, on the wall, with an apple, in the voice Theo used for things he thought were stupid, which was a very polite voice, the voice of a boy reading out a notice about fire drill.

He crossed it out. He got a third card.

He sat with the third card in front of him and the pen in his hand for about four minutes, which was a long time when you had twenty-five, and looked at it, and thought about how Theo talked. Not the words. The shape. Theo said things in the order they occurred to him, and stopped when he had said them, and did not put anything on the front or the back to make them sound like something else. Freddie. Pen. Does he get lunch? Me. Obviously. Ask, then.

He wrote:

Theo,

It’s yes.

He looked at it. That was right. That was exactly right. He went on.

Sunday 2nd November. 2 o’clock. At mine. You have to come to the side, not the front, because the front is where the tourists go in. The side is the north wing. There’s a door. Castellanos will be at it. Your mum and dad have to bring you and come back for you at 6, my mother says, because that’s what parents do. She says it’s the same in Milwaukee.

You don’t have to bring anything.

There’s going to be a cake. I don’t know what kind. Bridget has a view.

He looked at it. He read it through twice. It had all the parts and none of the extra ones. It sounded, he thought, as much like Theo as he could make anything sound, which was not very much, because it had my mother says in it and Castellanos will be at it and the word wing; but it was what was true, and it was in the order it had occurred to him, and it stopped when it had said it.

There was a space at the bottom of the card.

He did not know what to do with it. There was always a space at the bottom of a card, for the signature, and the thank-you letters had taught him exactly how much space to leave; but this space was bigger, because the message was shorter than he had thought it would be, and it sat there, white, at the bottom of the card, empty, waiting.

He drew a cake in it.

He did not decide to. His hand did it. He drew it the way he drew everything, the way he had drawn the bowl of fruit for Ms Varga: from the outside in, in its parts, exactly. A rectangle seen from the side, which was the cake. A smaller rectangle on top, which was the icing. A line through the middle, because it was a half-birthday and so it was a cake divided. And a candle, one, on the left-hand half, with a flame. And then, because that was how he drew, and because his hand was still going, he labelled it: a little line from the candle to the side of the card, and at the end of the line, very small, CANDLE (1). And a little line from the left half, HALF (A). And from the right half, HALF (B). And an arrow from the candle down into the cake, with INSERT written beside it.

He looked at it.

It was a set of instructions for assembling a half-birthday cake.

He sat at the desk in his room with the third card and his father’s pen and looked at what he had drawn, and found that his face was doing something, and that he did not know what, and that it was the thing it did just before he laughed in church.

He signed it.

He had to think about that too. He thought about it for nearly a minute, which he did not have. Not Frederick. Frederick was the thank-you letters, and Mrs Forsythe’s loops, and the engraved card. Not F. Hanover, which was his pass, and a list. And not the other one, because the other one was not his; it was Theo’s, Theo had found it, and you did not write somebody else’s word for you at the bottom of your own letter, it would be like signing their name.

He signed it with an F. Just that. One letter, in black ink, from his father’s pen, at the bottom of the card, under the cake, the way June had put one letter on each of the nine cakes.

Then he put it in an envelope, a plain one, and wrote THEO on the front, in capitals, and put the engraved card in his bag as well, in a separate pocket, because he did not know what else to do with it and it did not seem right to throw it away, and ran downstairs.

Castellanos was at the door.

“You’re running, sir.”

“I know.”

“Seat belt,” said Castellanos, and they went.

---

He gave it to Theo in homeroom, before roll call, while Mr Abernathy was writing on the board.

He did not lean across the gap. He had thought about leaning across the gap, the way Theo did, with one elbow on the desk, and had decided that he could not do it, because if he did it the whole of Room 14 would see him do it and know something was happening. So he simply put it on Theo’s desk, the envelope with THEO on the front, while Theo was looking in his bag for a pen, and took his hand away.

Theo looked at it.

He looked at it for some time. Then he looked at Frederick. Frederick looked at the board, where Mr Abernathy was writing WEDNESDAY 22 OCTOBER in large plain capitals under DO NOT BLEED.

Theo opened it.

He read it. He read it the way he ate an apple: slowly, all the way round, with enormous concentration, starting at the top and going down and not missing anything. Frederick watched him out of the corner of his eye. He saw him read It’s yes, and stop, and read it again. He saw him get to the north wing and his eyebrows go up. He saw him get to Bridget has a view and his mouth do something. He saw him get to the cake.

Theo looked at the cake for a long time.

Then he put his hand over his mouth.

He sat at his desk by the window three from the back, on the aisle side of the gap, with the card in one hand and the other hand over his mouth, absolutely still, with his shoulders going, very slightly, up and down, and his eyes watering, while Mr Abernathy at the front finished writing the date and turned round and opened the roll book and took the pen out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket; and Frederick sat beside him and looked straight ahead and thought, very hard, about the Fisheries Acts of three realms.

“Abrams,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here.”

Theo took his hand away from his mouth. He leaned across the gap. He did it the way he always did, one elbow on Frederick’s desk, his head quite close, and whispered, in a voice that was not quite steady:

“Insert.”

Frederick looked at the board.

“Bello.”

“Here.”

“Half B,” whispered Theo.

“Stop it.”

“Candle, one,” whispered Theo, and took his elbow off the desk and sat back and put his hand over his mouth again; and Frederick looked at the board, at DO NOT BLEED, and at Mr Abernathy, and at the radiator, which was banging, and at anything at all except the boy beside him, and held on, through Diaz and Eckhardt and Feeney and Gallagher and Grant, with both hands flat on the lid of his desk on the initials, like a man holding a door shut in a wind.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy, and paused, the length of a breath.

“Here,” said Frederick, and it came out about an octave higher than he had intended, and Mr Abernathy looked up at him over the roll book.

He looked at him for about two seconds. Then he looked at the desk beside him, at the boy with his hand over his mouth and his eyes streaming and a plain white card in his other hand with a drawing on it.

“Hartigan,” said Mr Abernathy.

Theo took his hand away from his mouth.

“Here,” he said, perfectly steadily.

Mr Abernathy looked at him a moment longer. Then he looked down, and made a mark, and went on to Ibrahim; and Frederick saw, he was almost certain he saw, at the corner of Mr Abernathy’s long face, something happen, and be put away.

---

“Do I bring anything?” said Theo, at break, on the wall.

“No. It says. You don’t have to bring anything.”

“I know it says. That’s what you say. I’m asking if I bring anything.”

“No.”

“I’ll bring something,” said Theo, and took the card out of his pocket, where he had put it, carefully, in the envelope, and looked at it again, and at the cake, and his shoulders started to go again, and he put it away. “I can’t look at it. I’ll never stop.”

“It’s a cake.”

“It’s not a cake, Freddie. It’s a kit.” Theo got out his apple. “You can’t just give someone a kit. They’ll think they’ve got to build it.” He bit the apple. “I love it. I’m keeping it for ever. Mum’s going to frame it.”

Frederick felt his face go hot.

“There’s another one,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Another what?”

He had not meant to. He had meant to leave the engraved card in his bag and take it home and put it in the drawer with the rubber shaped like a train. But Theo had said Mum, and Frederick had thought of Theo’s mum, whom he had never met, reading the card with the cake on it, at a kitchen table, in a flat on Dunmore Street, and not knowing who it was from, or what the north wing was, or why her son had been asked; and he had thought that she ought to know, and that the only thing that would tell her was the other card.

He got it out of the separate pocket in his bag and gave it to Theo.

Theo looked at it.

He did not laugh this time. He held it by its edges, the way Dame M had, and looked at the crest, and ran his thumb over it, and felt it stand up off the card; and read it, all of it, slowly, His Royal Highness the Prince of Columbia requests the pleasure of the company of Master Theodore Hartigan, with his lips moving very slightly on Theodore; and turned it over, and looked at the blank linen back, and turned it over again; and Frederick sat on the wall beside him and watched his face, and waited for the shadow to go across it, the one that had not gone across it on the second morning; because this was the thing, this card, this was exactly what the shadow was made of.

It did not go across.

“Informal,” said Theo.

“That means you don’t have to wear a sword.”

Theo looked at him. Then he looked back at the card.

“Can I have this one as well?” he said.

“What for?”

“For Mum,” said Theo. He turned it in the light so that the gold edge shone. “She’ll want it. For the drawer. She’s got a drawer of things like this. Not like this. Nothing like this. But she’s got a drawer. My christening certificate, and Kate’s swimming badges, and a letter from the Grand Duke’s office when my nan was ninety, and a menu from a restaurant in Kenosha where Dad asked her to marry him.” He held the card up. “This goes in the drawer.”

“It’s horrible.”

“It’s not horrible. It’s posh. It’s the poshest thing that’s ever happened to our family. It’s got gold on.” Theo put it in the envelope with the other one, very carefully, both of them, side by side, the plain card with the kit on it and the engraved card with the crest. “Mum gets the posh one. I get the kit.” He put the envelope inside his sweatshirt, against his chest, as though it might be rained on. “That’s fair.”

“Theo.”

“What.”

“Have you told them yet?”

Theo looked across the yard at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office. He lifted his hand. Castellanos’s finger came up off the cup.

“Tonight,” said Theo.

---

“Why does Theo get to go?” said Lucía, at lunch.

She said it the way she said everything, all at once, across the round table, with her fork in the air, having found it out, by some means, between break and fourth period, as she found out everything, by walking up to people and asking them.

The round table went quiet. Grant went red. Devon Price, behind his tray, looked at Frederick with an expression of great anxiety, as though Frederick might at any moment have to bow to somebody.

Frederick did not know what to say. He opened his mouth to explain about the Inspector, and the car, and the bowling alley on Canal Street, and why it would be one and not nine, and what Mr Pargeter had wanted, and a page from Balmoral in 1955; and found that it was all true and that none of it was the answer.

“Because I found it,” said Theo, without looking up from his tray.

Lucía stared at him.

“That’s what you said about the name.”

“Same thing,” said Theo. “I found the date. Nobody else had it. It was just lying there. In November. Empty. I found it.” He ate something brown. “If I’d found it and you hadn’t, I get to go. That’s how it works.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“That’s exactly how it works,” said June, putting down her yoghurt with a click. “It’s his half. He gets to say. And Theo found it, so Theo goes. And we didn’t, so we don’t.” She looked at Lucía. “That’s a principle.”

“It’s not a principle, it’s a…” Lucía stopped. She looked at June, and then at Theo, and then, for a long time, across the table, at Frederick; and Frederick saw her decide something, with her black hair in her eyes, and move it.

“Fine,” she said. “But you have to tell us. On Monday. Everything. What the cake was.”

“There’s going to be a kit,” said Theo.

“A what?”

Theo put his hand over his mouth, and looked at Frederick, and the two of them sat at the round table by the radiator with their hands over their mouths and their eyes watering, and the other seven looked at them, completely baffled, and at the counter at the end of the hall Mrs Tolliver, with her ladle, looked across at them, at two boys who could not stop laughing, and reached up behind her without looking, and turned the radio up, by about the width of a whole thumb.